After some reading, I came across this in the issues tab of Github: https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/issues/2
Regarding the short-circuit feature, would this greatly help when incorporating Xbee's into your rig or allow for better serial communication?
As of now, I have had a heck of a time (with my clockless UCS1903's so they require ALL interrupts to be disabled, even UART) trying to communicate over the serial port while an FX loop is running. This is partly due to my lack of programming experience, however I am learning/researching more everyday. I do not use a library with the Xbee's because they are transparent(AT mode) and act as a wireless serial port, and I keep my data set to be transmitted out, as small as possible. To get around this minor inconvenience, all my led fx loops fade out to black at some point where the slave then sends an "I'm ready for data" tag to the master controller, then the message is transmitted quickly, appropriate changes are written to the Arduino slave device, then back to the blinky new fx loop selected by the remote. It works... in a hack-y type of way.
The future: I plan to incorporate a MIDI IN and translate that data into functional data that can sent to the LED's as opposed to using a MSGEQ7 or the like. Does anyone have any suggestions/methods of madness or better protocol(s)?Unfortunately, the attempts I’ve made at allowing short interrupts between pixels (to allow for interrupts to be handled) have not appeared to work 
Also - you don’t want to do midi in on the arduino - midi has a very rigid protocol and clock rate - I don’t think that will mesh well here. (Also, for reference - doing the “got data? Gimme!” between frames is how I do it when I need to communicate with something running lights)
Ok, thanks for the info! In regards to the MIDI, I am keeping it on a separate Arduino and then wireless sending the interpreted MIDI data just because of the exact reasons you stated.
the Arduino Mdi library seems to work OK with my LPD8806 and fasLED library for my small experimental code.
The LPD8806 is SPI based, which means it doesn’t have the tight timing requirements that the WS2812/NeoPixels have, so I can leave interrupts enabled while pushing out that LED data.