Hong Kong is a place brimming with talented and intriguing people from all over the world. In our 27 Questions column, we get up close and personal with these notable personalities, learning about their whims and aversions, pivotal life moments, and hopes and dreams — all in roughly the same duration of a casual speed date. Our next segment of 27 Questions brings us to our very first duo to be featured on the series: Brett Yang and Eddy Chen, a.k.a. TwoSet Violin.

It would be an understatement to say that TwoSet Violin took the classical music world by storm. The channel started in 2013 as a way for violin students Brett Yang and Eddy Chen to share their lives at a conservatory through comedy. Their humour attracted both musicians and non-musicians alike, introducing classical music to a whole new community. Not to mention, the two Taiwanese-Australians are accomplished musicians in their own right, impressing viewers with their skills alongside their jokes.

Eleven years later, the channel now boasts more than 4.3 million subscribers and over 1.6 billion views. The pair have organised and led multiple world tours independently. Their shows embody their unique blend of classical music with modern comedy. After wrapping up their latest world tour, TwoSet Violin has just released their concert on video-on-demand on August 4th. Those who couldn’t make it to their shows can experience it for themselves, while those who watched the pair live can relive their memories of the show.

Lifestyle Asia sat down with Brett Yang and Eddy Chen while they were in town to perform (and dropped a Cantonese line that drove the crowd wild). If you can’t get enough of Brett and Eddy, check out our interview below to find out more about the duo. From their favourite Singlish slang to their exercise routine, and even a teaser for their upcoming project, this is 27 Questions with TwoSet Violin.

27 Questions: TwoSet Violin

Name: Brett Yang and Eddy Chen
Age: 32 and 31
Neighbourhood: Singapore
Occupation: YouTuber and violinist

1. What’s the best meal you’ve ever had in Hong Kong?

Brett Yang: Everything! There’s so many… The chasiu?
Eddy Chen: Yeah, chasiu’s good.
BY: Egg tarts!
EC: Oh, true. I think dim sum.

2. What’s your go-to boba shop?

EC: Whichever one wants to sponsor us for our next video. (laughs)
BY: (laughs) Yeah!

3. If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?

EC: Rice. Anything rice-related.
BY: Bubble tea.
EC: Just bubble tea?
BY: Yes. I’ll eat the pearls and drink the milk tea.
EC: Fair enough. Just inject it.

4. What’s one song or piece that you currently have on repeat?

BY: I don’t know.
EC: You don’t listen to your lo-fi on repeat?
BY: It’s already in my head.
EC: For me, Strauss’ Four Last Songs.

5. Which moment in your life would you most like to relive?

EC: It’s not so much a moment, but I miss being in my 20s and just having more energy in general. I think now in our 30s, I’m a bit like…
BY: I miss having bubble tea and being like… you don’t feel it the next day.
EC: Guilt-free bubble tea. 75% sugar. Now it’s 25%…
BY: Yeah, because your metabolism will just clear it out for you. Now it kind of stays for like a week. I miss the moments when my metabolism worked really well. No, it’s true! I had an egg tart today and I was like, oh no… It’s going to be here (gestures at belly), I can already feel it.

6. What’s your favourite childhood memory?

BY: I have many. When my parents gave me a Pokémon booster pack. Like, “That one behind the counter!” and they were like, “You practised this week, here you go!” I still remember that.
EC: I had a similar memory with Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. But then I brought the Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to school to show it off and they got stolen. So that’s more like a traumatic moment. (laughs) Early life lessons.
BY: (laughs) Don’t show off!
EC: Yeah, don’t show off, be humble! (laughs)

7. Who’s the best teacher you ever had and what’s one important lesson that they taught you?

EC: (laughs) Best teacher is life. It told me not to show off my Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.
BY: It’s tricky, because you get a lot of advice, but you’ve got to filter them through. Sometimes the advice doesn’t really correlate to you in that moment in time until you experience it. I feel like experience is your best teacher.
EC: That’s deep. And what’s the best lesson experience taught you?
BY: Not everything is what it looks like.

8. What’s the best gift that you’ve ever received?

BY: Fan gifts are pretty cool. Sometimes they make really creative cards. You open it and there’s like a 3D card coming out. That’s pretty cool.
EC: I was gonna be like… (laughs) “The gift of life from my parents.” Thanks mom, thanks dad.

9. Any memorable fan gifts you got recently?

BY: Oh, there’s so many. I mean, they’re all memorable. Usually, it’s like bracelets. Sometimes it’s like…
EC: Crochet. Like dolls of us playing the violin.
BY: Yeah, and flowers. Once, someone gave us like… a mattress of us? Remember that mattress one? That was pretty cool. Some chocolate, food. Bubble tea. A lot of bubble tea stuff, too. They’re all pretty memorable.

10. What’s your favourite and least favourite Ling Ling Workout/Violin Challenge?

BY: I hate the ones when you have to make the violin out of tune. It really confuses you.
EC: I like watching people switch hands because it’s always funny, but I hate doing it myself. So it’s my favourite to look at.

11. If you could do it all over again, what’s one thing that you would do differently?

BY: Practise more.
EC: That’s hard to say, because it’s like the butterfly effect, right? If you know something different, then things would turn out differently. So I feel like we did the best knowing what we did at the time and I’m quite happy with how things turned out.

12. When was the last time you felt starstruck?

BY: Shaking hands with Obama. The shaking hands with Obama happened at a G20 event. I had to play in a quartet for all of the world leaders and the delegates. Pretty much everyone was there and we played a couple of pieces. Of course, we can’t be there. I’m like me and my violin like, “What am I doing here?” and I go to walk off so they escort us off. But as we were escorted off, Obama came out and shook our hands. And then also the… I think the king of Saudi Arabia was also there too. He wanted a photo. But the security guards were there too, they were pretty big. I was kind of terrified.
EC: I think for me, meeting Hilary [Hahn] was a pretty crazy thing. Like a childhood violin hero. Definitely a fangirl moment.

13. What’s your favourite tradition?

BY: I actually just like eating food with everyone after the concert.
EC: Yeah, that’s nice. Post-concert meals.

14. What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done and why?

EC: Roller coasters. I hate roller coasters, but I got peer-pressured into doing them. I think I’ve developed a bit of tolerance for them now, but when I first did them, oh my God, it was so scary.
BY: Actually, I just had a traumatic memory. In primary school, we went to a place called Skull Island. You have to bring dirty clothes because it’s all muddy on this island. And you have to basically run away from people that try to catch you. And you’re just in nature all muddy, and you’ve got mud on your face, you’re running around. That was scary. It was a school thing. About 50 of us had to run in the wild on this island. It was quite big, you lose everyone and there’s like, people that have to catch you, you have to hide.
EC: But it sounds kind of fun.
BY: It was kind of fun, but, it’s terrifying. Because it’s all muddy, you can sink in the mud. There’s wood, you could cut yourself. There’s no one there.
EC: How’s that legal?
BY: I don’t know, it was just a thing. It was kind of fun, but I remember I got caught and I was like, “Noooo!” and they put mud on my face.
EC: Actually, playing on stage sometimes can still be scary every now and then. We’ve kind of gotten used to it because we’ve been doing it so much, but every now and then, I’ll just remember I’m in front of 2,000 people and I’m like… “Don’t think about it!”
BY: Yeah, or you’re playing and you’re like, “Oh my God, why are my hands sweaty and cold?” I’m scared of memory slips. Oh, that happens.
EC: Actually, our Mendelssohn concert was– oh, playing the Paganini last minute on the livestream. That two-week notice. That was scary.

15. What’s the most challenging piece or composition that you’ve ever had to play?

EC: I think Ysaÿe is pretty annoying.
BY: Ysaÿe is very challenging. I remember trying to learn Ysaÿe’s sixth sonata for violin. Whoa. Like, that’s hard. It’s really hard.
EC: It’s very easy for Ysaÿe — I did Ysaÿe 3 — it’s so easy for that piece to just sound scratchy and crunchy because there’s so much happening. To make it sound musical and exciting is so hard.
BY: And also, I had to learn Bach. It’s also very hard. It’s very hard to pull off a very convincing performance.

16. If you guys weren’t professional violinists, what would you be doing?

EC: Professional violist. Just kidding. (laughs) I don’t know. But I like to think whatever it is, I would be bringing the same amount of passion into whatever I choose to do. I love working. I make it a big part of my life and so whatever I want to do, I want to find it enjoyable.
BY: I don’t know, honestly.
EC: You’d be a professional… bubble tea…
BY: Connoisseur.

17. After all these years, what’s your proudest achievement so far?

BY: There’s so many. I think organising our world tour. Doing all that ourselves. It’s a lot of work, but it’s pretty amazing. To meet all the fans and perform and organize the logistics of everything. And coming up with the show as well.
EC: That and inspiring people to learn music and go to classical music concerts. I think that is a huge achievement.
BY: Everyone we’ve met, they’ve always said that they’re learning an instrument now, or…
EC: Or they started practising again after watching our videos. I think that’s so cool.

18. What’s the best thing about being TwoSet Violin?

BY: I think creatively we can do whatever we want. There’s no restraint to it. That’s pretty cool. There’s no one saying, “can’t do this, can’t do that.” I feel like it’s an endless creative stream to do whatever we want.

19. What’s the most stressful thing about being TwoSet Violin?

EC: The fact that we can do whatever we want. (laughs) It can be, actually, pretty stressful. There’s so many decisions and it’s like, how do you know what to do?
BY: Making multiple decisions when you’re not sure… I think that’s pretty stressful.

20. How do you think you’ve changed as a musician in the last decade?

EC: I think we’ve both improved heaps.
BY: I feel like everyone kind of moves at their own pace. For the last ten years, I’ve noticed that improvement actually doesn’t stop when you’re like, 20. It actually continues. As long as you put in good practise, then improvement will be there.
EC: For me, I’ve become more of a confident performer than ten years ago. I was very scared, a lot of performance anxiety. And I think both of our sounds have improved a lot. As a violinist, when you listen to other violinists, the thing that really distinguishes great violinists is the sound they can make. And I think both of our sounds have improved.
BY: Yeah, it improved a lot. I thought we wouldn’t improve after uni, but we still improved.

21. What’s your favourite Aussie slang?

EC: Yeah nah.
BY: (laughs) Yeah nah. That’s a good one. Yeah nah.

22. Have you guys picked up any Singlish? What’s your favourite Singlish slang?

BY: Can lah.
EC: A little bit. I don’t really speak it, but I can understand it.
BY: We can understand it now. For the first six months, it was very difficult, like “what are they saying?” Because the grammar is also switched around. I think my favourite is walao eh.
EC: (laughs) Yeah, that’s really funny. Walao eh! What else? I learned one, the paiseh piece. You know when you’re sharing food at a restaurant and there’s like one last dim sum and no one wants to take it because it’s the last one? That’s the paiseh piece.
BY: Nice. I didn’t know that one.

23. Do you guys exercise routinely?

EC: We try to.
BY: Yeah. Once you hit the age of 30, you have to.
EC: Yeah! You know how, like, when people get older, suddenly everyone gets into marathon running? It’s just a thing? I always thought it was a little weird, but now that I’m 30, I’m like… I kind of get it.
BY: “Yeah I’m joining this swimming club, this jogging club, this cycling club,” and I was like, “Why would you do that?” But now I get it.

24. Do you have an exercise regimen?

EC: We’ve been doing a bit of callisthenics, actually. So we usually alternate between cardio, which is running. I know you [Brett] do a bit of swimming as well, right? Callisthenics is to build your strength, which is actually really good for violinists as well, for support. The only thing is, as you build muscle, you have to re-adapt your violin playing because everything feels a bit different.
BY: Tension, also muscle weight, affects the bow control. It’s important to keep practising while you exercise. If you don’t practise for a while, it probably would affect how you navigate an instrument. You know, more muscle, more weight, less fat. The feeling becomes very different.
EC: Yeah, it just feels a bit foreign sometimes. You’re like, “oh, this feels a bit different.” And you’ve got to kind of retrain the neuro pathways. Something used to feel like this (does slow bicep curl), and now it feels like this (does fast bicep curl). These minor things have a big impact on your playing.
BY: I think it also really helps with posture. I noticed my posture’s better. I used to be quite hunched forward, but now it’s actually quite hard for me to do this (hunches forward) with these workouts. I don’t know, somehow your shoulder muscles go back.
EC: We should check the camera footage to see your posture. (laughs)

25. Is there anyone that you’d like to collaborate with in the future?

EC: We were talking about this recently, actually. I think we’d love to collaborate with some conductors and orchestras. That’d be really cool. Maybe someone like Simon Rattle, [Gustavo] Dudamel. That could be a really cool experience.

26. Any upcoming projects or tours that you can share with us?

EC: We’re currently wrapping up our world tour, which is cool. Our next project is an extension of a few fun little videos that we did two years ago. We had this idea that these composers would come into the present day from the past, so they time travel. So the project’s called B²TSM. We haven’t really said this, but in the first virtual tour we did ages ago, the storyline is we travel back in the past and met these composers. And then we had a video where they now time travel to today and form a boyband. So, think like a K-pop group but with these five composers: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich. We did two songs before and we want to make a proper album. So that’s something we’re working towards right now, and we’re hoping it will come out soon, in the second half of this year.

27. Do you have a message for your fans in Hong Kong?

BY: Go practise!
EC: Yeah, go practise!

Video: Ryan Putranto
Producer: Johanna Muliani

For bonus questions like Brett and Eddy’s travel bucket list and Sunday routine, check out our video on YouTube. Click here for more 27 Questions.