Electric Daisy Carnival 2017
I wanted to give you all the most open and straight forward review of my trip over to EDC Las Vegas. It is a from dust til dawn event that will leave you tired, yet euphoric. Most of the stories and reviews you will read on EDC will include some bias, I will hold nothing back. I also stayed on the strip, which many will you should Air B&B, but you really do miss the Vegas experience by staying off the strip. I went VIP with the premier shuttle, so I'll give you the distinctions I made between GA and VIP as well.
It was also my first time attending EDC in Las Vegas, so I'll give you 3 tips of which pitfalls to avoid and what I would do for an even better EDC in 2018.
The Good
Overall it was a great venue, with lots of great artists bringing their best to give the 400,000 people who showed up over the 3 day festival an amazing time. There were 8 stages, and 4 mini-stages (called Art-cars) which all had a different effects, design, and even performers who would go around and entertain the masses. There was even a secret Kaskade set at the Kallipoe Art-car but unfortunately I went to the wrong Art-car for that one...
My first tip to anyone going to EDC in the future is:
【=◈︿◈=】Visit every stage and leave no area unexplored 【=◈︿◈=】
Half of the experience is checking out all the production value of the venue, you paid hundreds for your ticket, get the most out of it.
My favorite stage by far was Circuit Grounds, it was very open and had some of the best artists perform there. I honestly felt like I should have stayed at this stage for most of the time, but every stage had it's own unique feature about it.
The amount of variety was also excellent, of course you only have the EDM genre to choose from, but there was everything from traditional Progressive House, to Dubstep, to Trance, Etc.. I also got to discover a lot of cool, newer artists that I wasn't as familiar with, such as Rezz, who killed it!
The Bad
The food... was not what I had hoped it would be. I was not expecting Coachella-grade food, but still the options were some of the worst I've had at a festival. I had pizza right off the bat, to which they only had cheese, and it was served to me ICE cold. I had a smoothie which mainly consisted of ICE and fruit flavoring. The "Fresh Sqeezed Juice" was straight up minute-maid. Anyways... here's my important lesson when it comes to food at EDC:
【=◈︿◈=】 Eat early, or not at all 【=◈︿◈=】
I had heard from other festival-goers that they were not as unimpressed because they actually had options when it came to eating. If you try to get food past midnight, you'll most likely have only 1 option left from the vendor because they do not store enough food to feed everyone the best stuff. You could also sneak in a few snacks, which I ended up doing for the last day.
DJ Khaled was so Bad, it was Good
No offense to DJ Khaled fans, but the EDC crowd was not having it at all. Not only did he have to go over his set time since backstage they could not get their shit together... but he went into Yellow Claw's scheduled time, which caused quite the uproar from the Yellow Claw "Soldiers" that were really looking forward to his set.
And then something Amazing happened... DJ Khaled got boo'd off stage:
The Ugly
The Shuttles were without a doubt the absolute worst part about the entire experience. I had read this before I went to EDC, and I took too lightly of it. My mistake was assuming that the new Premier shuttle service was going to be better than it was. The absolute worst day was Friday, since according to my Uber driver, everyone was taking the shuttle on Friday and there was practically nobody Ubering to the venue. Not only that, but our specific shuttle driver Bob went the complete wrong way and it took even longer than usual for us to get to the party on Friday. I wanted to get to the venue at about 10:00PM every night and ended up getting there past midnight the 2 out of 3 times we shuttled.
Average Shuttle Time: 2 - 3 hours
Average Uber Time: 1 hour
The one saving grace is that if you leave early, the Premier shuttle gets you out of there quickly, it took about 1 - 1 1/2 hours to get back. In a perfect world, I would have chosen to Uber to the venue everyday, and then take the premier shuttle service back to the hotel.
Most important tip to have the best EDC experience ever:
【=◈︿◈=】Go early, or you'll miss more than you were expecting to miss 【=◈︿◈=】
VIP vs GA:
The viewing decks were the absolute best part about the VIP experience, you got to not only see all the crowds of people squeezing together to catch the next headliner, but you got to actually see the DJ mixing the track! I feel that this is really what you pay for with VIP, so if this is what you're looking for, VIP is perfect. If you're looking for more than just nice viewing decks, you are probably better off just going GA.
Overall Rating: 4/ 5
Some of my favorite sets:
Friday: Zedd, Zomboy, and Audien B2B 3LAU
Saturday: Chase & Status, Porter Robinson, and Dillon Francis
Sunday: Rezz, Flux Pavilion, Yellow Claw, and Camo & Krooked