Lord Of The Rings — Rescore Of The Rohirrim Scene — LOTR: The Return Of The King

Lord Of The Rings is a series I dearly admire. Ever since I was in school with the release of Fellowship Of The Ring in 2001, and after…

Lord Of The Rings is a series I dearly admire. Ever since I was in school with the release of Fellowship Of The Ring in 2001, and after watching the trilogy a few times over in my youth and college, it’s a film series very dear to me.

I stumbled upon this clip from The Return Of The King of the battle of Rohirrim and it had only the SFX. Which made me pounce on the opportunity of giving a shot at scoring this iconic scene.

I actually studied the themes used in the actual movie but didn’t want to copy them. Instead, I made my own spin on the instrumentation using a lot of different VSTs in and out of the score.

For this score, I went pretty brass heavy. I started with some braams from my go-to brass VST library and added some strings that were slightly darker in texture, low on the keyboard, and ambient.

I used an interesting set of brass motifs, which were my own spin-off of the Isengard theme. It drives through most of the intro and as the leader of gives his speech I went with the pervading ambient textures along with some slight violins and a short but emotional piano motif that is embedded within the violins as he gives his speech.

Then I went brass heavy again along with percussive hits from my Hans Zimmer (HZ 01) percussion library. These braams were more of a build up along with the percussion hits continuing and leading the drama as the army of men begin to get inspired and riled up by their leader’s speech.

Then I started to push some string motifs, a couple of them, as the army of men begin to march towards the orcs. The strings evolve and the percussion continues and then are coupled by some interesting brass hits that are drenched in reverb as the army of men marches on towards the orcs, the latter of whom begin shooting arrows.

Then as a climax to the clip, I ditched the braams and percussion to only have some ethereal vocals of a choir from one of my favourite vocal libraries, so it feels like things are slowing down and accentuates the shot and they’re along with some ambient string textures as the clip comes to and end.

This was by far my favourite score I’ve ever worked on, which I’m definitely sure of, especially considering how much I love The Lord Of The Rings.

And it was also an opportunity to test my hands at a proper Hollywood Oscar-winning blockbuster and add my own niche ideas, touch and see how I would fit my music on to such an iconic scene.

It was great fun & interesting working on this 4-minute clip and its a score that I’m very proud of. I hope you like my take on this scene and liked the music I added to it.

It’s an iconic clip and I hope my score did justice to the scenes. Check out my score and give me some feedback in the comments below!

If you’re a director or producer and you like this score and you want me to work on any of your upcoming projects, shoot me an email at: gauravk113@gmail.com