One song I'm working on now, the lead plays naked but I've set up a few tables to give it some altered sounds that aren't used in the song itself. I'll be switching up the tables and duty length when I play it live soon, so I'll see how well it works. Sounds nice when I'm messing around, so..

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

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 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!"

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

Chuck the tempo on like 90 for a pattern or so.

.... Well thats all i do

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

I usually write all of my songs in live mode. I try to make everything loop seamlessly, but making transitions is always such a bitch.

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

Drooooone.

Live mode is no mystery, is easy!

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.

a fun live mode technique I've been really enjoying is writing "vamp sections" using a bit of aleatory ; 

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

One neat little thing you can do with live or song mode and this isnt something I have heard people talk much about is altering parameters while playing. Altering "Q" in wave instruments while a song is playing is alot of fun for sweepy type stuff.

I guess the difference is that in live mode, the channels can be queued up independently of one another. So while in song mode, all channels in the same row will play simultaneously, and the song position indicator will advance in-step (provided all chains in a row contain the same number of phrases). Live mode lets you coordinate playback from different rows in different channels simultaneously. So PU1 can be playing the chain at position 01 while PU2 plays the chain at position 2F, etc.

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.

^ Yeah, that's the same thing I was trying to explain with the "chunks" thing above.

Which, wasn't explained well either.

It's essentially so you can split up bits of songs and then loop them parts indefinitely and independently from any of the other channels.

Which is very useful.