- One, two, three, four
(melodic acoustic strumming)
Wait I messed up,
oh my god.
I'm so nervous!
So this is Nintendo Labo, it's a new DIY cardboard
accessory kit for the Switch, and it lets you make
things like a fishing rod, or motorcycle
and it comes with its own corresponding games for it.
Currently there's two kits on the market,
there's a seventy dollar variety kit, which comes with
five separate games, and there's an eighty dollar
robot kit which lets you suit-up and punch a bunch of
skyscrapers.
So you might be asking yourself,
why is this cardboard so expensive?
Aren't I just going to play with it once and
be done with it?
And the answer is no, there's this thing called
Toy-Con Garage, which is like a coding platform
that lets you remix all these different games
and basically make whatever you want with it.
But Nintendo's actually been putting out these
trailers that show all the different things you can do
with Toy-Con Garage, like a full on tank simulator
or a little device that feeds your pets.
And they also showed a little bit of what looked like
a Labo band.
I thought this was really cool and I wanted to
try it out for myself, so I thought of a really
simple song I could play, which is Rainbow Connection.
How hard could it be?
And two days later I am now a shell of a person.
(record scratch)
Lets start with the piano.
This is one of the more interesting, complicated pieces
of the variety kit.
The build guide says it takes about three hours to
build, but I think that's factoring in time that
it takes to make with a child.
Our production manager Meg, who is very much an adult,
it took her about half the time to make this.
So the software makes it really easy to follow along
step-by-step to build your cardboard toy.
And one of the best parts is moving around the camera,
you can zoom in, zoom out and it will really help
you visualize the toy in a 3D space.
You can go forwards and backwards if you miss a step,
and it's really great for kids.
They can take their time and learn exactly
what they're doing.
If you look at the back here, there's actually
little IR stickers placed on each key,
and when you press a note it reveals itself
to the infrared camera on the back of the red controller.
Which you then stick in the piano like this,
and then just put the keys back in here,
press a note which will then make a sound.
So there's also these little IR knobs
that you can add in to the piano.
They each have their own combination of IR stickers,
so depending on which one you put in,
it will change the sound of the toy piano.
So, here's one of my favorites,
which is the old man voice.
(melodic old man sounds)
And here's another cute one, cat sounds.
(Meowing)
So this isn't actually gonna help us make music
but I thought it was pretty fun.
So something that is going to help us make music
is this little lever here, which when you press it,
it changes the octave or lets you bend the pitch of
a note, like this.
(bouncy tone)
And one of the biggest challenges of making a Labo
band was choosing a song that was easy enough to play.
So I decided to go with, Rainbow Connection
which kind of happens mostly on one octave.
Except for this B note that I need right here.
So to do that I'm gonna press this lever
with the C sharp to get a B.
(harmonic tones)
So that was the easy part.
Now lets put this aside to move on to the hard part
which was making the guitar, and this did not
come with the variety kit.
We had to go and make this on our own.
Again, our superstar Meg, she signed this guitar
and made it out of a bunch of Popsicle sticks.
It's very much the kind of DIY that Nintendo's encouraging.
I can imagine it'd be pretty fun to make this with
your kids, or really fun for
adults who love arts and crafts.
This was the fun part, and this next part of
actually programing the chords, broke me.
So this is Toy-Con Garage and basically
how it works is with a series of notes.
So let's start with an input, which in our case
is a touch box.
And we're gonna connect that to an output,
which is making a sound.
And you can customize what kind of sound you want.
There's different keys, guitar sounds,
you can customize how long you want
the sound to be played.
So I'm gonna go ahead and connect these boxes here,
and that's what happens when you touch it.
So I want to make this look a little bit more like a guitar,
and what you can do is stretch out the this touch bar
so it looks more like a string,
and you can go ahead copy these nodes here.
Now I'm just gonna figure out exactly what notes
are in a G chord, and take it from there.
You can also change the octave of the keys,
so I need to make sure all these octaves are correct
for the chord.
I'm not a guitar player so I have to look up
each note in a G chord.
And I hope I'm doing this right.
(somber guitar sounds)
So actually I don't like that guitar sound
I'm gonna change it to an acoustic guitar sound.
So that was just one G chord, and if you want to
play a song like Rainbow Connection,
you have to program like six or seven different chords.
And I just want to show you guys what that
looks like on the screen, because it was a nightmare.
Basically I had to program a different button to
play a different chord and I was kind
of running out of space here so you can see
I cheated a little bit and made one touch bar
play like six different notes.
It took every brain cell I have
to learn how to do this.
So this is the programming mode, and now we're
gonna go to play mode.
Which clears the screen and lets you play without
moving any of the nodes around.
So if I press this button, that plays an E chord,
this is a G chord, and that's A minor.
(guitar strumming)
So I feel like I'm getting the hang of this,
but I really think that I probably could've
learned to play a real guitar in the time
it took me to program this on the Switch.
One, two, three, four
(playing Rainbow Connection)
So making a song on the Labo is just
scratching the surface of all the things
you can do with Toy-Con Garage.
Nintendo Labo isn't just about cardboard,
its an experience that's centered around learning
and whatever you decide to do with it is up to you.
I decided to make a song on the Labo.
I love it, it's my baby, very proud of what I've done.
Maybe overly proud, but I'm sure within
a few days the creative community is going to be able
to come up with some pretty cool things for it.
(playing Rainbow Connection)
If you like Nintendo Labo and you want to
check out more video game content
check out our sister site, polygon.com
They're our weird and hilarious cousins,
we love them and I think you'll love them too.