When “Big Mick” Talks,
Sound Engineers Ought To Listen!
By Nancy Caronia

Big Mick with Nexo Boxes

“Big” Mick Hughes has been “messing around with bands” since he was 16 and hauling gear for the original Judas Priest. Growing up in Birmingham, England, Hughes saw and worked with many of the legendary names associated with hard rock: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, ELO, and The Moody Blues. Today, at 43, Hughes is something of a legend himself. He’s been mixing Metallica for the last 18 years, but he’s also mixed other types of music including punk and reggae.

While an apprentice at British Steel, he learned his way around electronics and did freelance gigs for small bands, fixing gear and mixing sound. He started Concert Lighting when he was 21 and, although he was in the lighting business for some time, “sound has always been my passion. The lighting was a means to owning a company. I couldn’t own a sound company, it was too expensive. The investment was massive compared to lighting. At that time you could own a load of par cans on stands and have a lighting business, but to own a load of speakers was expensive.”

Through EVI Audio’s Bob Dole, the then owner of TechServe, Hughes did sound engineering for bands such as UB40, Dennis Brown, Yellow Man, and Jungle Man. There was even one gig in Jamaica with Reggae Sun Splash in 1982, but Hughes says, “It was my one and only time in Jamaica. It was too dangerous for me. There were armed guards in the complex in the hotel.”

After mixing The Armory Show for a year and a half the band’s managers asked Hughes to work with a then unknown heavy metal band out of San Francisco, Metallica. At the time he didn’t know what heavy metal was. Bands like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath were considered rock bands, not metal bands. He accepted the offer anyway and the rest, as they say, is history.

The long-standing collaboration between Metallica and Hughes forged many standards by which today’s heavy metal bands are judged. Hughes notes that one of the signatures of the genre was created on the road out of necessity. “When I started mixing Metallica the double bass drum beats could not be heard with a bass guitar pummeling away. I started to put more high-end in the bass drums. I don’t remember anyone at that time doing that the way we were. When you have a bass player like Cliff Burton, God rest his soul, going berserk on bass, you just couldn’t hear the bass drums. Instinctively I started to put some high-end in them and then there was this tck, tck, tck and it became a bit of a heavy metal thing. Everybody is still using it to this day.”

Heavy metal depends on lots of volume to make its point, but Hughes notes it can be challenging, particularly when the band does metal-in-the-round gigs.

Big Mick

“Playing 360 degrees is totally and utterly the worst. You’re hanging PA where you don’t normally hang PA. In America we can send drawings of the system, including the roof loading weight, but there’s also the possibility of heavy snow on the roof in some places. That can overload the weight to the limit.”

In his 20 years of sound engineering Hughes has seen and done it all and appreciates U.S. stadiums and arenas. “I think when you come to America all the venues are already geared up to accept shows. Everybody knows their place in the game and they all do their part to make shows go off effortlessly. When you come to Europe, it can be like pulling teeth to get things done, though certain countries are better than others.”

At times he said, gigs have been canceled due to unsafe conditions. “We were somewhere in Slovakia and when we were done putting the stage up it was bending under the weight of the PA. There was a show for 60,000 that night and the stage was crumbling in the middle. The local promoters said, “Yeah, yeah do it. It’ll be fine.” We didn’t even want to stand near the stage much less have screaming kids come roaring down and wedge against the barricade. Our production manager, Dan Brown said, “I think this is bullshit and we’re not doing the show.” The promoter was incensed and the local stagehands disappeared. We had a stadium system set up which meant even I was loading trucks that day.”

Metallica’s PA of choice these days is Nexo. The band uses two complete stadium systems and according to Hughes, he needs “copious amounts” of sub bass. “Nexo is the first choice right now. Obviously certain PAs lend themselves to different types of music better. I find you can do pretty much anything with the Nexo system. It’s a very open sounding PA. The tonality of it is really good and it works incredibly well.”

Hughes pays attention to how systems are arrayed, being careful not to put too much power down by the barricade while still covering an entire venue whether it’s Madison Square Garden or the Houston Astrodome. “I always walk around when we’re doing a set up day to make sure I’m getting all the different areas, but I also don’t want people standing right in front of this humongous block of PA to be crushed by the bottom row of it. If the PA is not turned down a bit to relieve the pressure, you’re killing everybody on the floor. There are definite volumes for different sounds around the venue. With Nexo in particular, and probably most other little box systems, you array them close together toward the top to get the longer throw. They sum together and throw further at the stadium, but as you come further down towards the front you start opening them up a little bit to spread the pair out.”

In spite of the fact that 30 percent of metal audiences wear earplugs, Hughes won’t do it. “Even if you were instinctively trying to make a deliberate effort not to mix brighter because you’re wearing earplugs, you can’t help yourself. You’re always tweaking to make it sound right and that ain’t right to anybody not wearing plugs. That’s ripping their heads off. I’m not going to subject anyone in the audience to something I wouldn’t subject myself to.”

Sometimes, Hughes says no matter what you do or don’t do, gigs go off without a hitch. “There are some gigs where you just can’t put a foot wrong. The minute you turn it on, you amaze yourself at the way it sounds. Then, whatever you do seems to make it way better.”

“The beautiful thing about the Nexo is they’ve already sorted out a lot of the nuances in the boxes and dealt with it in the electronics of the processor. There’s not a perfect box out there, each one of them has its own little problems, but the Nexo deals with that by using a digital processor, which weeds out these problem frequencies and corrects them. It also enhances other frequencies to make the system sound bigger and better. Some days you get those sort of situations where everything is like the moons and planets coming into perfect alignment. I’ve done 18 years with Metallica and we’ve had a lot of those kinds of gigs. We’ve also had a lot of gigs that have been crap as well. Where I’ve been like, “oh no, I don’t know what to do.” It does get like that sometimes. You are completely and utterly at a loss as to why it sounds so bad. If any sound engineer tells you any different, they are liars. Because everybody has a bad gig.”

Though he no longer soundchecks the band (“After 18 years I know what I expect to hear!”), he does do a line check, “but so far as the band playing--why? If it’s indoors, the place is empty and when it’s full later on everything will change dramatically. If you’re outdoors, then you can get away with anything anyway. Sound outdoors can be a lot of fun. It can be tough if you haven’t got enough power to do what you’re trying to do, but if you’ve got a sufficient system then doing sound outdoors can be nice. There’s no room reverberation, but you’re looking to make size with a piece of electronics other than some big arena booming away. You can hear the toys better outside, so it’s more fun to play with them.”