Slow Going

I have been doing so many random work tidbits during the previous week that I really felt it was a good time to walk away from FuzzMeasure for a short period of time. When I worked in music production, walking away proved to be the most important skill you could possess. When creating a new project, it's so easy to get caught up in the "new and exciting" feeling that new ideas, tracks, or instruments would give you. The smarter producers (at least from my point of view) would work in stages. You'd get waves of creativity, and throw new ideas down into your Cubase project as they come to you. At the first stage, there would often be 20-30 tracks of instruments, vocals, effects, ambiance, and whatever you could think of, all included in the file. At the time you create it, those 30 tracks would sound awesome – the next musical masterpiece. The next day, or a few days later (the more time you had, the better), you'd sit down at your workstation and listen to your masterpiece. It would most likely sound pretty terrible, but you still feel some inspiration from the main musical theme or idea that you were exploring. At this point, I have often thrown out many projects in their entirety because I felt that they were going nowhere. My "Songs" folder often contained about 100-200 tracks, many with just a 4-8 bar loop with ideas smushed together. Only about 5-6 of those ever became full-blown song ideas. If the song survived the first time you walked away and returned, this is where things started getting interesting. You'd find new ideas to explore, and old ideas to discard (or save in a whole separate track, if it warranted further exploration). I really did enjoy the music creation process, as it was both a creative, as well as a moderately intellectual exercise every time. I found that it gave me a lot of tools that were useful for other aspects of my life. So, what the heck does this all have to do with FuzzMeasure? Well, I walked away for a few days. I fired up FuzzMeasure for the first time in 5 days this morning, and I was shocked at how great it has gotten. FuzzMeasure has come a long way since version 1.0 (and the many betas before it). It certainly had a few features that I will walk away from, and there are a good handful of new features that I plan to add. Also, by walking away, I can now approach certain coding challenges I faced with a clear head. Before I walked away, I was having a lot of trouble with my drawing routines not working as quickly or cleanly as I'd hoped. Now, I feel that when I get back into the code, I will get this issue sorted out in a few short hours of work, and I can move even closer towards completing 1.2b1.