My favorite use of live mode has been to introduce songs live by slowly piecing them together. Kind of remixing my own songs/life on stage as a lead up to the original structure.

this, totally. every performance can be different!!!

I'm always a bit too afraid to fuck up the song by switching to live mode and triggering the wrong chain/pattern/whatever...
but when writing a completely new track from scratch, it's fucking awesome

This is indeed dangerous. But more dangerous is accidentally switching your master to slave (or worse even, MIDI) in the middle of a song resulting in a delicious drooooooooooooooooooooone and loud "SHITCAKES!"

.... Well thats all i do

For maximum Nullsleepishness, switch the sync mode to slave in the middle of a note.

Drooooone.

that's actually really cool. tried that with this one kind of drone-y song i've been working on, +5 epic points.

Drooooone.

At first it looks like a beast, but as soon as you try it, and start experimenting with it you'll see is the best thing in LSDJ.

The song mode is straightforward, and if you want to play something along other than the game boy, then keep doing it. But, in live mode, you can keep "mixing" your song the way you want it, you can keep it playing more than you made it the first time.

You can keep a bassline all the way thru a song while you keep drums and lead fucking it up the way you want. Or the other ways around. Really, no mystery. It come from error and repeat.

with pu1, pu2 and wav, write a few chains of various lengths using long melodies with generally the same harmonic material, then let 'em loose over a beat and blend accordingly. if the length of the melodies are different enough, and you just let them all cycle through at various times, you can get amazing "resultant" harmonic/melodic textures that you never would have planned for... if you are clever with volume envelopes, the mix of tones / melodies and registers can be quite beautiful, string quartet-like...

further, to create easy polyrhythm for these, write a few chains with different rhythmic lengths using the "H" command in the tracker screen. the chain with the hop will cycle its length simultaneously with the rest of the "song" screen still running straight 16th notes in 4/4, giving you a wacky, shifting groove. (i suggest being subtle with this, otherwise it can sound like utter shite)

Its extremely easy to get brain-bending grooves going if you throw, say, a 5/8 drum ostinato under the "resultant melody" technique i mentioned in the first section. also, its totally surprising and awesome to listen to because although you wrote the individual sections, hearing the material overlap in unexpected ways creates its own sort of organic "structure". try it, really ;D

But I'm probably misunderstanding what part of live mode is unclear here. In any event, the "rewinding" reference in the manual is sort of awkward & potentially misleading wording. Your interpretation that that section is just referring to using isolated islands of chains is right, I think.

Which, wasn't explained well either.

Which is very useful.