Introducing GDA's bracket-style Green Day guitar solo tournament

The GDA team is always thinking of new ways to entertain and inform all of you. The latest event on GDA is sure to do just that.

Starting today, all of you will be able to vote for your favorite of Green Day's many guitar solos in a bracket-style tournament (think NCAA basketball and March Madness, if that helps).

Ultimately, after 7 short rounds of voting, we'll be left with one song's solo that reigns supreme over all others. And, best of all: you, the readers, control the turnout.



Each Green Day song that has a substantial, original guitar solo is included in this tournament. Here are the characteristics that each solo must have for inclusion in the tournament:

• -Must contain more than a handful of different notes (not same couple of notes over and over)
• -Must not be a lead-in/bridge/other part: only guitar solos
• -Must appear only at one single part in the song
• -No guitar solos appearing in cover songs will be included

As for the actual structure of the tournament bracket, the GDA team came up with a format that we think will make the tournament as simple and efficient as possible. Each of the song match-ups for every round will be randomly determined from the songs that advanced. The first round contains 92 songs total, making 46 random match-ups. In the first round, there are even ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, ¡TRÉ! songs going up against songs from 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, which only makes things more interesting! Your votes will determine which songs move to the second round, and all rounds following that. *However, due to the number of songs included, we have to make one slight change to the flow of the tournament. After round 2 is complete, there will be 23 songs remaining. For round 3, there will be one large poll including all 23 remaining songs. After 3 days of voting, the top 16 songs will advance to the fourth round. We're doing it this way to create an even number of songs leading up to the last half of the tournament.*

In order to give all of our visitors enough time to vote, each round of voting will last either 2 or 3 days. The first round of voting starts today, and is open right now. Each round will last from the morning of the first day to 11:59pm on the last day. Here is the full schedule:

• Round One: 3 days (Saturday, July 20 - Monday, July 22)
• Round Two: 3 days (Tuesday, July 23 - Thursday, July 25)
• Round Three: 3 days (Friday, July 26 - Sunday, July 28)
• Round Four: 2 days (Tuesday, July 30 - Wednesday, July 31)
• Round Five: 2 days (Thursday, August 1 - Friday, August 2)
• Round Six: 2 days (Saturday, August 3 - Sunday, August 4)
• Round Seven [Final Round]: 2 days (Monday, August 5 - Tuesday, August 6)

To vote, you can visit our tournament page. There, you'll see individual two-song polls, with mp3 players below each poll. In order to refresh your memory, you can listen to each solo (trimmed out from the original song) and vote accordingly. Remember, this is NOT a favorite song contest. Listen to the guitar solos, and decide which one you like best. Simply voting for the song you prefer will defeat the purpose of this tournament. You can vote based on how flashy the solo is, how it fits into the song, the emotion provoked by it, or whatever you please.

In between rounds, we'll post a reminder, and tell you again how long you have to vote. We really hope you enjoy this tournament. Vote away!