2 Widows vs. 2 Violas - Silksong Widow OST Cover

Performing Christopher Larkin’s Silksong Widow OST, but we can only use 2 Violas… All whilst beating a modded Double Widow boss battle. As if this Hollow Knight: Silksong OST wasn’t already hard enough to play as part of a full string ensemble… Sheet music is available here! https://barthelmymusic.com/hollowknight The story of this Widow Viola Cover started in November 2025, when one of Ell’s pupils asked really nicely if he could play Silksong’s Widow OST for his Grade 8 Viola exam… Being a longstanding fan of Hollow Knight’s music, Ell obviously agreed to create this for him as a teacher-student duo arrangement. Ell had seen a few of Liam’s Hollow Knight violin covers on YouTube before - and once this more basic arrangement of the Widow Theme was finished, Ell contacted Liam in December 2025 suggesting a collaboration to record and publish it. One problem - we both felt the initial arrangement was too easy. It was written for a pupil after all - and so we took the original duo, and rewrote this Widow cover together on a 2hr discord call, making it far more intense, adding way more double & triple stops, and trying to create a sound more true to the original harmony and massive, symphonic scale of Christopher Larkin’s Widow OST. We also decided to repeat each section twice, swapping parts - so we’d both get a fair go at the hard bits :) The grind began - it took us a few long months to learn the more difficult parts up to the 160bpm speed of the original track, but by February we had our first early audio drafts recorded. This is where things started to escalate… We’d always intended to record gameplay footage of the Widow boss fight for the video background - but we got super distracted whilst browsing the enormous modlists on the community-created mod manager ‘Cogfly’. And it was here that we stumbled across an insane mod by adwamogus; which spawns 2 of EVERY enemy in the game, INCLUDING bosses. So yeah. OBVIOUSLY we had to beat a ‘Widow Duo’ to go with our Viola Duo. 7 hours of grinding attempts at the fight later, Liam had their first successful Double Widow clear. 15 hours into their own grind, Ell had managed to get a successful Double Widow clear as well. After a few more months of editing and polishing the tracks, an unplanned house move, a trapped nerve in an upper back, 2 bow rehairs and a broken laptop later, we had finally finished everything… This project physically and mentally broke us both, creating a true sea of sorrow (hopefully the DLC is out soon) , and took 6 months of our lives. And yet, we’d come out the other side rebuilt, whole, determined, and having fully bound the ancestral art of the VIOLA. We can finally say that we’ve TRULY conquered Widow - both individually, and as a duo. ********** Timestamps: 0:00 - Phase 1 - Liam Solo 1:00 - Phase 1 - Ell Solo 2:08 - Phase 2 - Ell Solo 2:54 - Phase 2 - Liam Solo About Ell: Hey! My name’s Elliot Corner, though y’all can call me Ell (they/them), and I’m a non-binary Composer, Viola player and Violinist based in London. I studied Viola Performance and Composition at the Royal College of Music here in the UK, and have done all sorts of weird and wonderful recording, performance, and session work across my career. Nowadays, I mostly write music for D&D and TTRPG's, alongside arranging lots of music for my pupils (and the odd passion project - I’ve been a massive HK fan for many years!) alongside teaching a busy schedule of violin, viola, and composition pupils each week. Website: www.elliotviola.co.uk About Liam: Hi! I’m Liam (any pronouns), and I’m a non-binary violinist, violist, pianist, and composer based in New England. I have been arranging my favorite video game music for almost 10 years, and I am just making my way into the music world after graduating from Yale. Aside from this channel, I also teach some young violin students and play in a community orchestra! Website: https://barthelmymusic.com Credits: Shoutout to adwamogus and the entire Hollow Knight modding community for their amazing work on the Double Enemies mod - go to https://www.nexusmods.com/hollowknigh... to try this yourself! Or download Cogfly at https://github.com/Nix-main/Cogfly to play all sorts of mods including this one in one convenient place! Modded Silksong gameplay is just as fun as it looks; the Double Widow fight is no joke, but was enormously satisfying to clear. Another shoutout to Ell’s Viola pupil Joey - this entire project is your fault!! Hope your GCSE’s went well, and can’t wait to see what the examiner thinks of this arrangement in the comments on your Grade 8 Marksheet later this year :) Original Composer: Christopher Larkin (Team Cherry) Arrangement: Elliot Corner & Liam Barthelmy Mixing & Mastering - Elliot Corner Video Editing & Production: Liam Barthelmy Recording Equipment & Effects used: DAW: Logic Pro, Focusrite Red 3 Compressor / Ozone 11 Elements Mics: Shure SM57 (Liam) & AKG C214 (Ell)