It’s the Entire 3+ Hour Lord of the Rings Score Gone Metal!

January 25th, 2022 at 3:26pm
Vince Neilstein
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I’ve been re-watching the original Lord of the Rings trilogy over the past few weeks (I can only handle about an hour per sitting!), and so much of it still holds up 20 years later. That’s certainly true of the score, which has a handful of iconic themes that have become synonymous with the franchise.

YouTuber Bradley Hall, an avowed metalhead, loves the score so much he made his own metal version of it… all three-plus hours of the first film (the extended version, naturally)! Hall explained of his motivation to take on the project:

“Howard Shore’s music from the legendary Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy captivated me ever since I first heard it way back in 2001. It was so epic, majestic, mystical…and pretty damn Metal! It was my hope that one day someone would make a full Metal version of the films, but alas that day never came. So as a culmination of months of pandemic-induced boredom/frustration/madmess I plucked up the courage to finally do it myself!
“Several months later, I proudly present the entirety of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring presented as one giant Metal song! ????”

Hall describes how he accomplished this magnificent feat of nerdom:

“I imported my 5.1 surround-sound version of the Blu-ray into Reaper so I could split the audio tracks up into separate channels. The majority of the dialogue is in a single channel, so I could mute it and be left with an almost-instrumental version of the movie. I then had to painstakingly tempo-map the entire movie audio to a grid so that I could program drums over it. Once tempo-mapping was done it was “just” a case of laying-down all the drums and guitars. Thankfully I had the orchestral score as a reference guide which sped-up the process significantly!”

You might recognize Hall from his past metal-related YouTube endeavors, including playing the guitar solo from Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” backwards.

Have a listen and a watch below. Time to start on the other two films, Brad!