TwoSet Violin are an Australian comedy duo consisting of Australian violinists Brett Yang and Eddy Chen. They are best known for their musical comedy and antics on their YouTube channel, which has reached over 2.59 million subscribers and 591 million views as of 24 July 2020.
History
Brett Yang and Eddy Chen first met each other in maths tutoring, when Yang was 14 and Chen 13. They became acquainted as the youngest members of a youth orchestra, and later as students at Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Yang's debut at Queensland Conservatorium was playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in 2012, and he has worked with various Australian orchestras, including a performance at the 2014 G20 Brisbane summit. Chen was a finalist for the National Young Virtuoso Award in Queensland in 2014, and had played with the Queensland and Melbourne symphonies. In 2013, they started posting YouTube videos of cover tunes of pop music played on the violin. In an interview with CutCommon, Yang said that they saw violin virtuosos who had racked up millions of views on YouTube playing covers and had attempted to do the same to minimal reaction. They then discovered that violinist Ray Chen had made a few funny videos, and changed their content to a less serious, more comedic tone. They focused their videos on their lives in the conservatory culture, as classical musicians, and as students, which led to a dramatic increase in viewership. Yang and Chen had played in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Queensland Symphony Orchestra respectively, but had produced their own material to do a tour, which was in the format more of a comedy act than a concert. The act would feature violin playing woven through the story-line. Using KickStarter as their fundraising method, and busking in Sydney, they raised enough money to go on a worldwide tour in 2017 to 11 cities in 10 countries, in Asia and Europe including Taipei, Helsinki, and Frankfurt. In 2018, they toured places in the United States including New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In 2018, their YouTube channel received the Silver Play Button, and in 2019, they received the Gold Play Button. Kyle Macdonald of Classic FM listed Ray Chen, TwoSet Violin and social media as one of the "10 ways the 2010s changed classical music forever". On January 22, 2020, it was announced that TwoSet Violin would be attending the Menuhin Competition held at Richmond, Virginia as roving reporters, however, it was postponed to May of 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. On February 8, 2020, TwoSet Violin livestreamed their performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 to celebrate achieving 2 million subscribers, where Yang played the solo part and Chen performed an original arrangement of the orchestral component for solo violin.
Videos, gimmicks and themes
In 2017, TwoSet Violin made a comedic reference to Ling Ling, a fictional violinist who "practices 40 hours a day". In an interview with Yle Uutiset, they describe Ling Ling as a main boss of a video game, a Chuck Norris of violin players. Chen said they improvised the character from their comedy sketch video concerning a teenage violin student's tiger mom comparing the student to her friend's child. In 2018, they released a series of videos called the Ling Ling Workout. In these challenges, the duo draws a classical piece, and a playing "handicap" such as playing with double speed, an oddly tuned string, while dancing or hula hooping, with hand positions reversed, or while upside down. Prominent violinists such as Ray Chen, Ziyu He, and Hilary Hahn have also attempted the challenge on their channel. In July 2018, they released a series of videos where they appear to be playing classical music using rubber chickens. In August 2018, they released a video series called "1% Violin Skills, 99% Editing Skills" in which Yang attempts to play a difficult piece, and Chen asks him to play a chromatic scale. Chen then uses video editing to piece together the notes as originally composed. Other gimmicks have included violin charades, playing other instruments, and viola jokes. For April Fool's Day 2019, they claimed they discovered a new Double Violin Concerto by J.S. Bach. TwoSet Violin have also reviewed film and TV show scenes that feature violin playing, pointing out egregiously fake performances. In March 2019, they criticized Chinese idols Ju Jingyi and Ma Xueyang for faking violin performance on a show. On 14 September 2018, TwoSet Violin posted a reaction video to a BBC News story titled "Fastest Violinist in the World", in which they challenged violinist Ben Lee's Guinness World Record claim of playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" for what they perceived to be wild inaccuracy; they then satirically timed themselves purposefully playing random fast notes before declaring they had just broken the world record. In April 2019, the duo similarly called out Vov Dylan, who was awarded the title of World's Fastest Violinist by The Australian Book Of Records, saying that Dylan's rendition of "Bumblebee" was even worse than that of Lee's.
