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!

Completed Game Design Foundations on LinkedIn Learning

- lmn

One of the best things about starting afresh in a new domain of work, is learning about the domain itself – its goals and significance, the various terms and jargon that describe it and where my own work and contributions fit within it. This is something I have the opportunity to do these days having recently made the switch from Music Technology to Gaming. Until now, my exposure to computer / video games had been only as a consumer hooked onto some awesome and engaging games, much to the concern of my parents and leading to a few not-so-impressive grades in my school and university progress reports. I then sort of drifted away from gaming and devoted much of my attention to Machine Learning and Music Technology. But now gaming has assumed a professional significance in my life through my current role at Unity. Specifically the field of Game Design to which my current research project is related.

So, I did a bit of looking around for an introductory resources on Game Design. I found a few books, blog posts and articles online but what really caught my attention was a three-part course on Game Design Foundations offered by Brenda Romero on LinkedIn Learning. After quickly skimming over the course material, I had no hesitation to sign up and get started with it. And now, after about two-and-a-half weeks, I’m done with the material thoroughly enough to understand what my colleagues in the project are talking about and some exciting thoughts on how my role as an ML expert could fit into the overall project! Now I know what someone means when they say “Core Loop” or “Lootbox”, or what it is a designer has in mind when aiming to design a fun and engaging game. I’m only getting started, and it’s all very exciting!

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 – C.F.T: New Circuitry and Continued Evolution by ISIS

- lmn

It’s a shame that the word ISIS has ended up with such a ghastly reputation, because the pioneering post-metal band by the same name happens to be one of my all-time favourites. There’s not one album released by them that I feel anything less than love for! I’ve always wanted to play songs by ISIS, but I kept putting it off because I knew they used non-standard tunings as well as heavily down-tuned guitars, both of which as many guitarists would agree are a nightmare to deal with if you have a guitar with a Floyd-Rose tremolo arm.

Having purchased my PRS with a fixed bridge about a year ago, it became really easy to re-tune it to non-standard tunings. I also happened to figure out only quite recently that my Boss GT-100 pedal contained a pitch-shift effect that allowed me to tune whatever I played up or down by a number of semi-tones, which led to the recently published Meshuggah cover video.

And now I took a shot at quite a simple and very trippy ISIS song called C.F.T: New Circuitry and Continued Evolution from their debut full-length album Celestial. I couldn’t find a backing track for it so I’m playing it over a metronome beat, plus the guitar is not tuned all the way down to the same note as that in the original. Like I said, it’s more about satisfying this urge to play any song by this band than anything else here. Hopefully, more challenging and better recorded songs in the future!

New Guitar Video – Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver by Primus

- lmn

Here’s the third and final Primus number from my list before I switch to some different music for a little while. This one was quite challenging, especially when it came to the second solo. Some tricky note-transitions in it to work with. And I was also surprised to see what actually constituted the guitar and the bass parts while learning to play it. Larry Lalonde at his best!

These three Primus songs – Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver, Jerry was a Racecar Driver and John the Fisherman – gave me a good sense of Larry’s unique and quirky playing style, which I have really come to admire, but there’s still more interesting songs like My Name is Mudd, Welcome to this World and many others that I’m really looking forward to playing in the future when I get back to Primus after a break!

Goodbye, Moodagent!

- lmn

Today I handed in my resignation at Moodagent. It’s been a great year and some months working in this fast and ambitious company! I will associate this experience most with the great friends I’ve made here, my focus on data preparation, Apache Spark, Collaborative Filtering and a feeling that I’ve really improved my programming abilities thanks to some excellent Coursera courses (this one, and this one) I completed while working here.

It’s time to move on to new pastures! An update to follow soon.

New Guitar Video – John the Fisherman by Primus

- lmn

I’ve always been a big fan of Larry Lalonde’s playing style and how it so cleverly accompanies Les Claypool’s challenging and unique basslines in most of Primus’ songs. I recently decided to learn to play five Primus songs in order to develop a greater appreciation for this style. The first of these is John the Fisherman. Not a difficult song, really, and fun to play. A great one to get started with!

This is also the first video with my beautiful new Ibanez RG-3120 guitar!

Completed Programming Languages (Part B) on Coursera

- lmn

Earlier at the start of this month, I began the second Programming Languages course (Part B), offered by Prof. Dan Grossman of the University of Washington. I had done the first course a few months ago and found it very beneficial when it came to my understanding of some functional programming concepts and idioms, the notion of elegance in programming and good programming practices in general. It also really helped me formalise much of what I had come across in relation to Functional Programming, and approach the adoption of this style of programming more systematically in my own day-to-day programming projects. After nearly two months of having done that very interesting and challenging course, and having felt that a good bit of it had sunk in I decided to take on this second one.

The goals of this course were three-fold:

  1. To allow one to apply some of what was taught in the first course in the context of Standard ML (SML) to a new programming language, namely Racket.
  2. To introduce features of Dynamically Typed programming languages through Racket, and compare these in contrast with those of Statically Typed programming languages, such as SML.
  3. To understand the inner workings of a language interpreter by implementing one for a very simple hypothetical programming language in Racket.

I won’t be going into much details about the learnings of this course yet. I plan to do so in a couple of months when I’ll be done with the third and final course in this module and I will have had the chance to re-visit the contents of the first two courses to gain a better overall perspective.

In the meantime, here’s the certificate I was awarded for completing it.