Ariana Grande performed “No Tears Left to Cry,” her latest single, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night. What’s interesting is that the entire song was played with Nintendo Labo instruments, with the help of the Roots. You can watch the performance above, and it’s worth your time. A serious amount of effort had to have gone into making this work.
Just putting together the Labo piano requires a few hours and a lot of concentration, although the software tools allow you to write and sequence intricate songs once it’s put together. You’ll also see Labo guitars in the video, which is a project that Nintendo has explained in the past. But what’s going on with the Robot suit and the use of the fishing rod as a musical instrument?
There’s an area of the software that comes with the cardboard toys called the Toy-Con Garage that lets you create your own toys, or just use your coding skills to get your existing toys to do things they weren’t originally intended to do. In this case, it looks like someone on the production team spent some time adjusting the toys so that, for instance, they would play a certain note or sound if they were moved a certain way.
The result is a very neat way to play the song, and a video that has already racked up over 400,000 views since it went live last night.
