Ok, so I like electronic dance music, more specifically Trance. When I started in the 1990's, the US was a bit behind in that department.
Still, with San Francisco and San Jose nearby, I've had some opportunities to see some great EDM/Trance DJs. Back in the early 2000's, they sadly played club music in the US that was nowhere close to the hits they had composed and were known for, but over the years, as Trance started becoming more popular, those DJs finally started playing their good tunes in the US too, and maybe from 2004 on, it's only been getting better. Popsicle Halloween 2004 was really the beginning of great music parties in the San Francisco Area, and thankfully things have gotten even better since then
As a matter of fact, after another 10 years (2015 and beyond) the good news is that Trance has grown quite a following in the US, and places like the SF Bay Area, and while Trance has been declared dead a few times in the last 10 years, it's still going strong here.
Trance Family SF is definitely strong in the area, we've been getting more big trance parties every year, including many top DJs that come visit us what feels like every other week now (as of 2018-2019), and through those events, I made many friends in Trance Family SF. Thanks to you all.
Over those years, I got the chance to meet a few of my favourite DJs, including Armin more than once, and my last hobby has been to work on lights for my shirt and pants (version 3) and (version 4)
And if you are curious about my LED outfit, you can read more about it on my led peacock engineer medium post and if you'd like to read all my festivals or dreamstate, or clubbing posts, please click on the links higher on the page to get taken to those categories.
As per the previous report on Maddix OTC, the cool thing about Winter Music Conference in Miami, is all the DJs who are there in town for the week and many end up performing at various clubs during the week, in this case after Ultra in the evening. Because Ultra is in the middle of the city, it has a midnight curfew, and that's a good way to go to parties afterwards. For Trance, La Otra had us covered with a great trance lineup: Gabriel and Dresden, Aly and Fila, Ferry Corsten, Alexander Popov, Adam Scott, Kristina Sky, John 00 Flemming, Giuseppe Ottaviani, and more...
Got to see many friend DJs again, awesome!
I was slightly worried that security at the club would be picky and difficult, but they were super nice, which was a great surprise. Thank you.
Friday Night
lots of DJs came to hang out
Lovely night, eventually had to go to bed to get a bit of sleep before the next day that started at noon at Ultra
Saturday Night
The next night, the end of UMF didn't feel essential, and I wanted to avoid the guaranteed mess it was going to be to stay until the end and hope to get an uber, so we left a bit early and went back to Otra for more trance and hanging out with more trance DJs who were also there to enjoy the night.
Before I start, I fully expect some who mostly, or only goes to Ultra to want to tell me how wrong I am, but if so, can I invite you to look at my other festival reports and try other festivals like EDC Vegas or Beyond Wonderland Socal, or Dreamstate Socal, and then come back and tell me what you think? And if you have been to many other festivals (good for you), if you feel my review is blatantly unfair or incorrect, please send me feedback (DM on FB or IG) and I will definitely hear what you have to say as well as take fixes/corrections.
Let's mix things up for fun and start with the end :)
So, let's start with the end ;)
Should you go, Would I go back?
I try to be positive and look at the bright side, I can't say Ultra was a bad experience like Creamfields, or Lumi, both in great part due to terrible security teams, but overall it was on the disappointing side for a top world festival that's been around for so long. Why is that?
They are stuck in a place that's too small. I'm told they did try to move to the island across the bridge, but that did not work out.
I actually feel they did about as good a job with the footprint they have, clearly they had many years to refine it. Sound bleed was limited, at least 3 stages were quite good, but the other ones were ok-ish at best, like the psytrance stage on day 2 that had two big trees in front of it and blocked most pictures of the DJs and LED board with their name
Ok, except for mainstage. It was borderline a death trap if you were on the wrong side and were hoping to get out during a bit set. Getting around was almost impossible during the bigger sets at night. Worse, if you were in the middle and you did secure an ok spot, there was a constant stream of people crossing and pushing in all directions, pretty much 0 PLUR on that front
I do want to give thanks to all the fine folks who did spread PLUR and smiles, but there weren't enough of them.
And back to the mainstage problem, there were 2 stags on the other side, and they were almost impossible to get to or out of without getting past mainstage, which was super hard at times. There was no path around or behind that could get you across (or at least none that I found).
This is where you'd tell me I should have paid for VIP, which given it was over $1000 felt unreasonable given that Ultra is nowhere close to EDC and does not warrant prices like this, I've read that the experience in VIP was also not great (too many people) but I didn't get to check for myself.
oh, did I saw $1000 for VIP? It was actually between $1500 and $2000, a complete joke
The ASOT stage was actually ok and easy to get in and out, although the entire dancefloor was quite slanted which can be an issue if you're actually dancing
The techno stage (Resistance) was quite decent and the only one that survived during the terrible rain storm on sunday
Yeah, the rain, it's florida, the stage I usually avoid because I'm not a fan of unpredictable terrible weather and hurricanes. Despite Ultra being early in the season, as weather is worsening and becoming more unpredictable worldwide, last year had torrential rains during the event, and this year was even worse, 4H of very heavy rain, rain that was so bad that all stages shut down but one, and the last one was only kept running thanks to the heroics of the tech steams that were literally dealing with enough water to collapse the entire structure and flood the DJ booth
So the sunday lineup was greatly impacted, many DJs never got to play their sets, and unfortunately Ultra never pushed schedule updates to their own app (apparently you had to know to go on some website that did have an updated lineup somewhere).
Speaking about the app, it was plain bad for a festival of that caliber. It had one job, to show the schedule and let you save what you wanted to see, and then just show that. It failed miserably at that one job on both Android and IOS. Worse, on Android the app really completely did not even show Armin playing mainstage at all, despite multiple attempts on several days. Come on Ultra, you can do better
just to show I'm not joking, notice the hole at 1750 after Morten, that's where Armin was...
Another thing I was not overly impressed with was the security at the entrance. They were not creamfields bad, or lumi bad, but the security line on Friday was pretty ridiculous (almost 1h30) probably because they were too thorough until they were told not to on the 2nd day, but come on, it's not the first time they do this. At the same time, there were not enough lines for a festival that big, hence the ridiculous lines with no fewer than 4 helicopters hovering and recording this entire line barely moving, probably for local TV news (but with 4 different helis, just to make sure). Kind of pathetic, really.
I got lucky with security on day 1, but day 2, it got down to "why do you have 5 USB cables, you need to leave some behind" as well as "you have too many safety pins (aroudn 10) in this tiny plastic bag, you need to leave half behind" (barely paraphrased). They were nice enough to let me in with my 2 phones, 2 handheld cameras, and multiple USB battery packs, as well as the LED outfit (unlike creamfields and lumi), but they made me leave behind LED shoelaces, a backup small raspberry pi microcomputer (size of a matchbox), and other semi expensive gear I had to abandon in a plastic bag outside and hope it would still be there on my way out. Of course, my brand new LED outfit I was testing, broke during the day and was super hard to fix without all the things I was forced to leave outside (I then had to leave early that night to get them back before security left and got lucky it didn't rain), I totally understand security guidelines are not trivial and I bring random looking unusual stuff :) but they sure acted very random and confused about what to do. I used the opportunity that I had to get my bag back on night 2 to show them why I was carrying that stuff (i.e. my outfit working at night), and after that they were cool and nice the next day. Thanks to them.
always good to make friends :)
but earlier that day, I really struggled to fix my brand new LED outfit without my tools. Not fun...
and I still need to re-state that the tech teams did a pretty incredible job given all the challenges they have to deal with, including massive rain.
as for the money machine part, it feels that they could be more generous. For starters, a few DJ'ing at the event only got a single day wristband. Not even a wristband to go to the other 2 days. That feels petty :-
But yeah, unless you live in Miami, you should go to Beyond Wonderland instead, it's not even close ;) (hell, even if you live in Miami, unless you can't fly, you really should consider Beyond, it's so much better on about all levels). And seriously, if you don't find $2000 insulting for VIP tickets for an overcrowded show in a small park, I'm not sure what to say...
All that said, let's get back to reviewing the Ultra Festival itself:
Grounds
as mentioned above, getting in sucked. Almost 1h30 in line to get through security, unacceptable
finally through, but took so long that we missed the entire first set plus half of Ruben's set
the park is otherwise pretty
it's fun to party in such a location with such a background
People
as I mentioned, Ultra could use more PLUR, but there were still some folks who were wearing fun outfits, and kandi trading opportunities ;)
The Torrential Rain on Day 3
Day 3 was a complete clusterfudge. It was raining hard, and I mean hard for hours in a row. We were denied entry for 30mn or so while lightening was going on, and then they did let us in, but only one stage was running, and barely given the Noah's Ark levels of rain:
yeah, you don't say...
'friday' was a mistake, it was sunday
that's the amount of water in the air
eventually water got in and was trying to flood the DJ booth
the ASOT worldwide stage was actually quite decent, but it was sad to arrive 90mn late and miss
missed half of Ruben de Ronde due to the very slow security, but the 2nd half was very enjoyable
Nifra went more into Techno, as she has been doing recently
Miss Monique was playing at the real Techno stage, next door
live stage
then, back for Maddix
the visuals were not bad
ending with a b2b2b
The next day was psytrance day:
unfortunate stage location with trees in front of it
mainstage earlier in the afternoon, was bearable, and honestly the only time it was worth being there. After that, it was so overcrowded that it was unbearable:
randomly found Armin playing at mainstage, which was not announced at all in the android app ("you had one job, ultra...")"
Didn't stay that much longer that evening since security had half my stuff (hundreds of dollars worse) at the gate and were going to leave at 22:30 from what they said, so I left early to get my bag back, but that was a plus since the afterparty at Otra was loads of fun
After the Day 3 rain I described above, many hours later, the rain subsided, but it took a while for the stages to re-open:
We still got a few fireworks at night:
the drone show was not fully visible unless you were at mainstage, which was flooded and crowded
Ended the night with Above and Beyond, but left 15mn before the end to avoid being left with no ride out at all (not enough ubers):
And that qas it for Ultra!
Conclusions/Suggestions
Honestly, Ultra has been running for long enough, I doubt that they care about feedback. They have a money machine like tomorrowland (except TMRL is actually not overcrowded in comparison and the footprint is many times better), the place is small enough that even by overselling it, it's not really that many people, so if they lose a bunch, more will come. That said, if I have to list just a few:
the current location is too small for the amount of people coming. It's a disservice to people who buy tickets to sell that many for that location
more security lines to improve flow and maybe a bit of extra training for them on what true threats are (and that's not an easy topic). Taking USB cables or replacement LED shoelaces from someone to prevent risk of strangling (and I mean, come on, how many people have been strangled by shoelaces in festivals) is utterly pointless if they are wearing shoelaces already and those shoes are allowed in.
waterproofing more stages?
offering a lot more covered areas given the very obvious chance of terrible rain.
For attendees, as I said before, the obvious answers are to go to Beyond Wonderland Socal and EDC Vegas instead.
But how about WMC, Winter Music Conference
Well, half unexpectedly, as much as Ultra was not bad but not super enjoyable either, the parties before/after were actually a lot of fun. It was nice to be able to hang out with all the DJs that were in town anyway due to WMC. I wouldn't say it's worth for me to go back to Miami just for the out of UMC, but if going to Miami is easy and doesn't conflict with snowboarding plans ;) it's a fair amount of club parties all in one place over a few days.
Sunday night had another party, but I had an early flight monday morning to go directly to tahoe to catch a snow storm :)
The parties were definitely fun, maybe not flying across the US or the world, for, but if you're already there, absolutely worth going to, and in some ways, they were more enjoyable than UMF itself.
One nice thing about Winter Music Conference in Miami, is all the DJs who are there in town for the week and many end up performing at various clubs during the week, before or during Ultra. You can actually spend the week in town and go to parties all week without ever going to Ultra itself.
Maddix did the first party we went to, a 7H OTC at Mad Club Wynwood, with lots of B2Bs with other DJs who were in town. It was an interesting mix of different kinds of techno depending on which DJ was playing for that slot.
I was slightly worried that security at the club would be picky and difficult, but they were super nice, which was a great surprise. Thank you.
nice neighborhood
Randomly found a few people outside while heading out ;)
So, every time I went to see a laser show, from someone else, including Gareth's Laser City shows (and honestly I preferred "laserface" to "laser city" as a name), my reaction was unfortuantely always "it was nice, but laserface 2018 was (so) much better. Nothing has come close since then". Until today.
Ok, Bill Graham is a very nice venue, so that helped, but this time was the first time that Gareth brought more lasers than 2018 and made a great show out of it, and it was super impressive. This is now the new benchmark as the best laser show ever!
warning, lasers will be in use, haha
Arrived early to meet friends and attempt to get a good seat for the show. To be honest, the 2 opening DJs didn't play anything to write home about, it was burning time for the next 3H until Gareth would start. I'm sure they're not even bad DJs, but I'm guessing they had clear instructions not to shine too much, bummer...
So it was a good time to meet friends and take pictures :)
maybe not visible, but I also had the new prototype of my thinner and flexible LED outfit
The 2 DJs I had never heard about before: Robot Sunrise and Vision V:
sold out!
and then the countdown for Gareth
And finally the real sho started at 22:20:
a lot more vertical lasers:
but I prefered this
One treat like previous shows, is having Annabel join and sing, and this time as per my previous feedback, they got the lighting right so that you could see them on stage, which was another nice improvemnt:
did Gareth manage to play live plus mix live by himself? If so, super impressive
The cyberpunk storyline was a nice addition:
The lasers got even prettier around the end:
The whole show was 90mn, it didn't last that long, but it was beyond excellent. Gareth didn't play as much trance as he did in 2018, but I didn't expect he would, times have changed and 7 years later trance is not loved by as many people anymore. On the plus side, I did like the music selection he picked, so that was all good.
The one question the engineer in me has, is whether the entire show was a playback performance on a pre-recorded track that was perfectly synchronized to the lasers, or whether Gareth found a way to play some, or all of that music live and still stay perfectly synchronized with the lasers (with Annabel also singing live and on key, which is always challenging in a loud concert environment). What do you think?
My answer is honestly I think it may have been live, at least parts of it, but I don't overly care either way, the show was flawless and really enjoyable, which is what matters.
well done indeed
elbow bump is the new fistbump :)
After the show was over, afterparty at August Hall (formerly Ruby Skye).
crew picture
Gareth arrived around 01:00 and played a bit random music, but it was a good way to end the night:
The previous v6 was an attempt at simplyfying v5 by integrating the batteries directly to the back of the panels. In the case of Lipo batteries that I cannot let run flat or they'll be damaged forever, and need for extra wiring for the balance connector, it was simpler to attach everything to the back of the panels, but it made the panels quite heavy and more bulky looking.
That outfit served me well, but outside of bulk and weight, one issue was getting the lipo batteries through airports. They are totally legal and allowed, but they had to be removed from the outfit every time I flew, which was a pain in unwiring/re-wiring, but even then, I would get stopped more than half the time I went through Xray while they got a supervisor to confirm that yes indeed the batteries were fine. A few times, I got less educated people who reacted in lesser ways, and called more people, a few times causing delays of 30mn or more. To be more specific:
I met the bomb specialist of the day at SFO airport, twice. Very nice guy both times, for 30mn+ delay
In Thailand my first trip was fine, but my last flight of the 2nd trip, I got 12 people including the army asking me why would I fly with this?
more than once, I was told my lipo batteries had a simliar shape to C4 explosives, which I guess is true, but not my fault. I have learned however that once people say "it looks like [something scary]", even if they agree it's not, I have still lost
Another time in France, I had to argue with the police who were mostly being dicks that day and told me I had too many batteries because I could only carry as many as I would need in flight (which was entirely untrue and made up, but they had the guns)
The batteries are in green below, they showed up pretty reliably on Xrays and the whole thing would get flagged and then they would have to look at them and the wires, and often were not super happy:
So, I ended up making a removable battery pack that was wired correctly, and putting it the right way was tricky, so set it up to be correct and in one piece that could be removed and re-added with less work for each flight:
But it didn't take long to find out that even carrying the batteries separately that way still made TSA unhappy at times, and unless I unplugged absolutely everything and rebuild the whole thing every time, they would not be very happy and that was a pain for me to take apart and rebuild every single time. They still occasionally said it looked like C-4.
I wasn't being a contratrian for fun, and see how many world TSAs I could win an argument with, I just didn't really have many other options, I did need those big batteries because my outfit does need lots of power, and 5V USB battery packs simply do not output enough amps.
tried with USB packs
it was not fun, I had to segment power use in different busses plugged into different ports of battery packs, very cumbersome and the first tone to die could shut down everything
But after multiple years (and to be fair, it was many flights and most were fine, but the 5-10% that were not, were _not_ fun), technology finally evolved into whas that gave me better options: using less scary looking USB powerbanks that were finally able to output enough watts to power my panels without dipping power enough to cause reboots and crashes from the CPUs.
so I built a new system with dual 20V input (each one is sufficient on its own)
I have 2 USB-PD selector boards that output into a diode to avoid backfeed, and this goes into a DC-DC converter that takes the 20V down to 5V at up to 20A although probably only 5A max is really needed
It of course runs fine from a single battery:
At the same time, I made a big upgrade on the panel side by using flexible PCB panels that are differnetly thinner. At the same time I switched to RPI0 2W which is slightly more powerful than an RPI3a while being much smaller:
Now the whole thing looks nicer and lighter:
I did switch the big ESP32 to a smaller smaller ESP32 C3 (2 shown in this picture), which can still output to an LED strip if I really want/need. I also tried to switch to a smaller electrodragon passive-3 board that was custom designed to fit the RPI0 2W. It doesn't have the room for the level shifters, but turns out for an ABCDE panel, the passive board worked just as well (top on the picture vs the bigger red one in the middle):
The old setup had 300Wh of battery capacity, and that was real capacity, no BS. I measured it to give me a bit over 18H of runtime, which was very nice indeed, and helpful for places like tomorrowland where I had to camp and go 3 nights without ability to recharge.
This new setup differs a good amount because:
the panels are similar resolution and size, but they are a new design with flex PCB panels that are much thinner
they are still not as thin as LEDs inside the clothing, but in order to make it lighter and thinner, the batteries were moved back out
at the time of my original design, USB batteries were just not really on par with what I needed. My setup does use 5V, but it needs a lot more amps than any battery pack can take, and last I tried, it required an awkward setup where I used 3 different USB ports. But 3 years later, there are finally USB battery packs that can output 100W on a single port as 20V/5A via USB-PD, and that is more than plenty to run the panels as well as than run a Raspberry Pi without the voltage dipping and causing a reboot.
the new battery packs, while sold as almost 100Wh, all deliver around 75Wh of real power, which unfortunately is only good enough for 5.5h of runtime per battery. The loss of capacity is due both marketing lies, and the capacity that is given is the ideal capacity of the lithium batteries inside the USB pack, but that power has to be up-converted to 20V and losses happen in that process. Later I confirmed that up-converting to 15V was sufficient, so that helped a little bit. On the plus side, 11H is enough for most uses, and worst case I can hot swap an empty battery without even shutting down/rebooting the system
I also changed the rPI3a for a smaller rPi0 2w and a smaller ESP32 replaced with ESP32 S3. The rPi+ESP used 28% of the power, while the 6 panels used 72% of the power. The smaller Rip0 2w + ESP32 S3 probably takes probably just a bit less power, but it's a small enough percentage that I didn't go measure it.
End result
Same on youtube:
But of course, nothing can be simple, this new design brought some new issues:
After using it the first time at ASOT NL 2025 the wooden frame got detached in no time, failure of the 2.5mm screws
very early version without clips on both sides
just a bit of tape to hold things together, clips on sides and top
it was built until the flight and I didn't have time to add a protective frame
the panels were so cheaply made that the screws receptacles came unglued
Another issue I didn't like with these ABCDE panels is that the screws were 2.5mm instead of 3mm for unknown reasons and it was hard to attach to something that small.
Switching to a different 128x64 P2 Flex Panel vendor, but ending up with ABC panels that barely worked with rpi-rgb-panel
The ABC panels had 3mm screws, which was better, but I found out even those things also popped out. I had to carefully re-glue them in without leaking glue on the panel pixels:
Sadly those ABC panels had different chips that required huge gpio slowdowns or suffered from noise and display issues:
new chips
It took a few weeks, and very kind help from board707 and multiple issues to make a new line addressing shift register pusher that was faster and didn't have the noise/corruption issue:
while doing all this, I did confirm that the smaller electrodragon passive-3 board does pick up more noise and isn't able to drive as fast as the bigger active-3 board
once I figured all that out, finally got the ABC panels to work almost as fast as ABCDE and now have a nice screet/pixel protector
USB powerbank failures
It didn't take long before I found out that many powerbanks do very badly at outputting 20V long term, and some of their ports half die and only do 5V after a while, which is not enough for me:
It took some tracking down to catch real time failures:
Flexible PCB solder point failures
This is now the biggest and unsolved issue with my new setup. Anything that moves and flexes, fails, and sure enough the same law applies here:
flexing the PCB can cause any of those points to fail, causing the above
and they fail in different ways :(
Oh no, it looks terrible when it fails in the wrong place
Easier Replacing of Panels
I wish I could say I have a great solution to those panels that fail due to flexing and solder point failures:
5165*|2 different failures
5165*|by hand flexing the panel, it brings the connection back, but it's not a solution
5164*|my new design makes swappping panels faster, and not requiring a soldering iron
This is not a great long term solution, but I have no better idea for now outside of going back to bigger and bulkier non flexible panels.
New Pants
I redesigned the pant straps to use smaller black loops first glued and then sown into the pants:
looks more tidy
end result
New LED Hats
this was my old Dreamstate Hat, it looks cool but it's heavy
so I made new ones that are much lighter
funny thing is the very first time I flew with the new hats, I was detained because of them :)
Upgraded LED Shoes with bright Shoelaces
I got new brighter shoelaces but the batteries didnt even last a day
So I made a connector to plug into the shoe's bigger batteries I upgraded
End result:
Extending battery life
Originally I setup my battery packs to output 20V, which means the power is upconverted to 20V and then downconverted to 5V but with 10A (way more than needed), Trial and error showed that my battery packs do seem to output more energy when I lowered the voltage to 15V, and after modifying my code a little bit, I was able to make it run off 12V (the battery pack only outputs 3A at 12V, or 36W. Normally my code should not use 36W, I've measured it to use around 8W average, but in peak use situations it can draw more, and if the 5V voltage dips a bit too much as a result, the rPi will crash and reboot).
I have a "few" battery packs, different sizes and weights, but the weight adds up:
The good news is that I'm now able to use smaller packs that can still output 60Wh, but only up to 12V. The bigger packs can do 100W at 20V and output up to 75Wh on a good day, although most of mine often seem to do less (they are of course rated for 99Wh)
in the process, I found out the Wh totalizer in these meters, is garbage and can't be trusted
nicer/bigger 100W capable pack (more than I need) with better totalizer
new test at 15V instead of 20V (the red boards can be changed to ask any voltage) with diodes to prevent backfeed
measuring the loss between 15V input and 5V output
trying again with 12V, we can also note the voltage drop at 1.4A
some surprising results, some 75Wh packs emptied quicker than expected, only got 65Wh from thsi one
a fun part of this exercise is figuring out if the Wh totalizers are even good
I'm getting a bit longer runtime by only using 12V intead of 20V and this allows using smaller battery packs that only do 12V
I'm pretty disappointed in those 100W/99Wh packs that seem to output as little as 55Wh at 12V
on the plus side I can now get 14.5h with the bigger battery packs, but I should be getting a lot more if they did output 75Wh
There is a 10% loss from down converting from 12V to 5V with my DC-DC converter, probably acceptable
The smaller packs seem to work almost as well for a much smaller size, their main downside is they don't charge nearly as fast (the 100W packs can charge in 1.5h at max speed given the proper power supply).
