I think we can all agree that J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings is pretty metal. From Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin to Burzum, Blind Guardian, Amon Amarth, Christopher Lee and beyond, the direct influence on the genre and many of its masterpieces is as obvious as it gets. This influence has only been amplified by Peter Jackson's world-conquering cinematic trilogy, with the music and imagery of the series popping up everywhere in metal since its release.
Now one metalhead has come to rule them all, YouTuber Bradley Hall has turned the entire first movie in Jackson's trilogy The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring into a three-hour metal epic!
The obviously very talented Hall provided some insight into the inspiration for this epic piece.
"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/madness I plucked up the courage to finally do it myself!"
Hall also provided some answers to the questions you're likely itching to ask in a Q'n'A in the video description, two answers from which can be seen below, for the rest head on over to the video and check it out.
Will it work if I try and sync this to the original movie?
Yes! I played on top of the extended Blu-ray edition, so if you start this video at the same time as your Blu-ray copy it should line up perfectly.
How was this done?
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!
Listen to metal
