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New Guitar Video – Man in the Box (Acoustic) by Alice in Chains

- lmn

Continuing with the Grunge nostalgia, here’s a song by one of my top bands from the whole Seattle Grunge scene – Alice in Chains! I’d uploaded a cover of this song a long time ago on YouTube, but this one is special. I spent some time coming up with an acoustic arrangement for the song, and did a proper recording on GarageBand with some video editing help from my wife, Nina. And I’m uploading it as a tribute to this amazing band on the 21st Anniversary of the release of their debut album Facelift.

Happy anniversary, Alice in Chains!

New Guitar Video – Rusty Cage by Soundgarden

- lmn

This is the second, and in fact my favourite, track by Soundgarden from the Road Rash soundtrack. I’ve already gone over how I came across this and Outshined in my last post, so I’ll go straight to the video here. I skipped the somewhat longish intro, unfortunately, because it was tricky to align it with the backing track which had not metronome ticks. I’d been practising it alongside that other track, and so here it is!

New Guitar Video – Superunknown by Soundgarden

- lmn

I’m going through a bit of a Grunge nostalgia these days. Back in college, I went through a phase when I was really into this genre of music and went to great lengths to get my hands of music by bands from the 90s Grunge era. And I also enjoyed learning to play many of these songs but never got down to recording them in any form.

I recently realised that although Soundgarden was one of my favourite bands from that time, I never really learned to play any of their music, which brings me to this video. The title track for this legendary album – Superunknown! This is hopefully the first of a few Soundgarden tracks I’ll be uploading. There’s also an in-progress version of this track I uploaded with my two little buddies flying about as I recorded the video if you go to my channel :-).

I’m also playing this song in a drop-tuning with my PRS, and the backing track also tuned down.

New Guitar Video – Americana by the Offspring

- lmn

Here’s another one from my early teens! I’m not such a massive fan of The Offspring otherwise, but this album holds a very special significance to me given when I bought it and all the special memories I associate listening to it with. And this song, while not necessarily one of the more popular ones from this album, is definitely one of the most fun and energetic ones when it comes to play! The last video of the year, with hopefully more to come in the next year. Merry Christmas and happy New Year everyone!

Hello, Unity!

- lmn

I’m very pleased to announce that, starting today, I will be a Senior Machine Learning Developer at Unity Labs in Copenhagen. Its parent company – Unity Technologies, is well-known for having produced one of the most widely used gaming engines – Unity. I’m super-excited about this change of focus in my work from music to gaming, and really look forward to getting started!

At Unity Labs, I will be creating Machine Learning solutions in technology for use by Game Designers. This is about all I know for now, and hope that I can share more updates as time passes.

New Guitar Video – The Pot by Tool

- lmn

I wasn’t so taken by this song when I first heard it, but I revisited it while warming myself up for the release of Tool’s Fear Innoculum last year, and somehow got really hooked onto it, so much that I ended up learning how to play it. This is the first video I’m posting with my new PRS SE Mark Holcomb Signature Edition electric guitar! I play it in the guitar’s standard tuning – Drop C.

Getting Started with Python Pandas

- lmn

I finally decided to get myself familiar with pandas while working on a recent side-project related to recommender systems. When I got started with it, I was still stubborn that I could achieve most things I needed to do in relation to data pre-processing with Python modules like tools like glob, json, numpy and scipy. True as that may be, I found myself spending way too much time writing routines to process the data itself and not getting anywhere close to working on the actual project. This was very reminiscent of the time a few years ago when I got immersed in writing code to manually compute gradients for various neural network architectures while getting nowhere in developing a music prediction model before finally deciding to make my life easier with theano! And so, this seemed like the perfect time to get started with learning pandas.

In the past I’ve found that, especially when it comes to learning useful features of new modules in Python, a hands-on and practical approach is much better than reviewing documentation and learning various features of a module without much of an application context, so I started looking around for such tutorial introductions to pandas. In the process I came across two invaluable resources that I thought I’d highlight here in this blog post. These really aren’t much, but gave me a surprisingly thorough (and quick) start to employ pandas in my own project.

Kaggle Learn

Kaggle Learn has a bunch of very well-organised and basic introductory Micro-courses on various Data Science topics from Machine Learning, to Data IO and Visualisation. I get started with the Pandas Micro-course which proved to be the ideal starting point for someone like me that had never used the module previously. This can be followed up with some of the other micro-courses, such as the one on data visualisation or embeddings which help one understand various concepts better through application. In fact, it’s what I’m planning to do as well!

Pandas Exercises on GitHub

So the Pandas Micro-course was a great starting point, but still left me wanting more practice on the topic as I still didn’t feel totally fluent. It was then that I stumbled upon a fantastic compilation of Pandas exercises on GitHub by Guilherme Samora. So I cloned the repository, loaded these exercises up on Jupyter Notebook and got down to solving them one after another! This really did help with getting more fluent with the rich set of tools that Pandas has to offer.

By the time I was done with Guilherme’s exercises (only a couple of days after starting with the Kaggle micro-course), I felt ready to apply my newly acquired pandas skills to my own project, and to discover more about the module through it. There certainly were plenty more resources that a quick Google search returned, but none appealed as much to me at a first glance, as the two I finally went with.

I’m sure I have only scratched the surface when it comes to useful pandas learning resources, and I’m very curious to hear about those that others have found useful, and why, so that I can look them up as well! So do feel free to share them in the comments below.

A New Blog Series on the Music Tech Community – India Website

- lmn

As some of you might already know, I have been volunteering with a few of my peers in India to promote awareness about Music Technology in the country through the Music Tech Community – India initiative. Upon my suggestion, during the past months we had agreed upon and planned to begin a new blog post series that would contain interviews with individuals engaged with Music Technology in India, or elsewhere but who are from India. We hope that readers of this blog post series will have much to learn from the experiences of these individuals and that this will help them gain valuable insights into the field and inspire them to shape their own careers in the future.

I’m very pleased to announce today that we just published the first post in this series on the website! It is an interview with an active member of the community and a researcher applying Information Retrieval techniques to Indian classical music – Ajay Srinivasamurthy. During the weeks that preceded the publication of the post, we got in touch with Ajay who kindly offered to take part in this initiative. You can read what Ajay had to say during the interview in the blog post.

I believe this is a great start, and I look forward to more of such interesting chats in the future!

Passed Rock School Grade 6 (Electric Guitar) Exam

- lmn

A couple of weeks ago on Jun 9, 2017 I gave my first music certification exam – RSL Awards Rock School Grade 6 (Electric Guitar). I’m very pleased to share that I passed it with a distinction! Before the exam, I recorded my performances of the three pieces I chose to play as a part of it. The entire piece is given except the solos which have been composed by me. I uploaded them on YouTube, initially to share with my tutor, and now with everyone else! Here they are…

D’oro

- lmn

I like using the Pomodoro Technique to remind me to take short breaks while I’m immersed in work. And I thought it would be nice to create a little command-line Pomodoro Timer for myself that will pop up desktop notifications telling me that it’s time to take a break. I call this very simple and minimal Pomodoro timer app D’oro and it can be invoked using a command called doro once it has been installed.

You can clone the repository from its Gitlab page . I intend to write an installation script and also create a Debian package for it in the future, but it works and I love using it everyday at work!