Four months after issuing an open call-out to guitarists to fight for a solo spot on one of their new tracks, Bilmuri has announced the competition’s winner.
In January, Johnny Franck – leader of the hook-heavy metalcore outfit – turned to social media to help find someone who could record a solo for Bilmuri’s forthcoming track. It prompted a guitar solo arms race, with many big-name players throwing their hat in the ring.
Intervals’ Aaron Marshall, social media shredder Connor Kaminski and Novelists guitarist Pierre Danel were just a few of the hopefuls who all recorded themselves playing an original solo over the Bilmuri track. Heck, even mega-producer Diplo got involved.
Now, after trawling through the many, many, many entries, Bilmuri has now shared Where to Find Me in all its entirety – complete with its flashy new solo, which was provided by Danel's Novelists co-guitarist, Florestan Durand.
“Bilmuri has always been a guitar band,” Franck says in a new Instagram video. “If you look at our Spotify bio it says, ‘We strive to seek for optimal levels of dank riffage.’ And that has not changed at all.
“The song Where To Find Me, I could not come up with a sick-ass riff and so I threw it up into the universe and the guitar community came through and sent about one million solos to me. I loved so many of them.”
In his post, Franck shares his favorite entries, which came from Shane Trainor, Aaron Marshalls, Spence Peppard, Sam Jacobs, Connor Kaminski, Scro, and Pierre Danel. Sydney Roten also got a shout-out for her, er, Slash-inspired entry.
Of course, there can be only one winner, and it was Durand who ended up on the record. No mean feat, considering the competition he was up against. But he was a worthy winner.
A scroll through Franck’s highlights reel will show you the level of competition Durand was up against. Scro’s wild two-hand tapping lines were mesmerizing. Marshall’s harmonic-laced entry was equally spell-binding. Roten’s Sweet Child O' Mine riffage took the song in an interesting creative direction.
But Durand was judged to have served the song best, with a lead effort that goes big on melody and winds up some sweet legato runs that fulfilled the Bilmuri search.
“Thank you so much for having me on your track,” Durand wrote in a comment on Franck’s post.
In an interview with Guitar World last year, Franck opened up on the origins of Bilmuri, and discussed how it ended up growing far beyond its initial ambitions.
