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.
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“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.