Being a YouTuber is all about pushing boundaries, creating content no-one's seen before. For Bradley Hall, such ideas seem to come naturally.
Take his five-minute composition speed run series, for example – which so far has seen him write and record songs in the styles of Slipknot, Iron Maiden, System of a Down and more, each in five minutes or less. Or his humorous lambasts of heavy metal stereotypes and clichés, like his recent nail-on-the-head take on the typical '80s electric guitar solo.
But his latest video might just be his most ambitious yet: transforming the entire first Lord of the Rings movie (The Fellowship of the Ring) into a three-hour-long metal song.
From its opening sequence – which details how the film's main antagonist, Sauron, creates The One Ring – to the fellowship's adventures into the underground Dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm, Hall has meticulously crafted a new metal-themed soundtrack for Peter Jackson's 2001 epic, and it's honestly mind-boggling.
Each section matches the movie brilliantly. Upon the introduction of The Shire, for example, Hall employs more melodic power-metal lead phrases, while the arrival of Sauron's servants, the Nazgûl, is met with a combination of thrash-metal alternate picking and powerchords with a massive orchestral backdrop.
The project, Hall says, took “about three months of grinding”, which itself is pretty impressive given its gargantuan scale. “[I've] been no-lifing getting it finished this week and I am actually dead inside now,” he joked in a YouTube Community post two weeks ago.
“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,” Hall writes in the video's description.
“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!”
To see more guitar-related shenanigans from Bradley Hall, head to his official YouTube channel.
