"Big" Mick Hughes (born 1960) is the live British audio engineer for Metallica, a position he has held since 1984.
He was born in 1960 and grew up in
Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1. ...
, England. While an apprentice at
British Steel Corporation
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
, he studied electronics at a local technical college and also gained experience on the thriving Midlands music scene including working as a roadie for Judas Priest. In the early 1980s, working for the PA company Techserve he engineered for bands including
UB40
UB40 are an English reggae and pop band, formed in December 1978 in Birmingham, England. The band has had more than 50 singles in the UK Singles Chart, and has also achieved considerable international success. They have been nominated for the ...
,
Dennis Brown
Dennis Emmanuel Brown CD (1 February 1957 – 1 July 1999) was a Jamaican reggae singer. During his prolific career, which began in the late 1960s when he was aged eleven, he recorded more than 75 albums and was one of the major stars of lo ...
,
Yellowman
Winston Foster , better known by the stage name Yellowman, is a Jamaican reggae and dancehall deejay, also known as King Yellowman. He first became popular in Jamaica in the 1980s, rising to prominence with a series of singles that established ...
, and Jungle Man before becoming the touring sound engineer for
The Armoury Show
The Armoury Show were a British New wave music, new wave band, formed in 1983 and consisting of Richard Jobson (television presenter), Richard Jobson on vocals, Russell Webb (musician), Russell Webb on bass guitar, John McGeoch on guitar and Jo ...
, who featured ex
The Skids
Skids are a Scottish punk rock and new wave band, formed in Dunfermline in 1977 by Stuart Adamson (guitar, keyboards, percussion and backing vocals), William Simpson (bass guitar and backing vocals), Thomas Kellichan (drums) and Richard Jo ...
John McGeoch
John Alexander McGeoch (25 August 1955 – 4 March 2004) was a Scottish musician and songwriter. He is best known as the guitarist of the rock bands Magazine (1977-1980) and Siouxsie and the Banshees (1980-1982).
He has been described as one ...
.
The Armoury Show's management company QPrime then asked Mick to engineer a band they had just signed called Metallica (prompting Mick to ask "What's heavy metal?" when told the genre of music they played) starting a relationship that has lasted nearly 40 years.
Big Mick has mixed Metallica at every one of the more than 1500 shows they have performed since their November 1984 tour of Europe, with one exception: on the
, Mick was hospitalised with heart palpitations. Michael J "Geese" Graphix, Audio System Engineer for Electrotec and mix engineer for such acts as Guns N' Roses and Nine Inch Nails, stepped in and mixed FOH for two shows: 24 July 1998 in
Antioch, Tennessee
Antioch is a neighborhood of Nashville located approximately 12 miles southeast of Downtown Nashville. It is served by the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County.
History
The community known as Antioch began at the converge ...
, and 25 July 1998 in
Noblesville, Indiana
Noblesville is a city in and the county seat of Hamilton County, Indiana, United States, a part of the north Indianapolis suburbs along the White River. The population was 51,969 at the 2010 census making it the state's 14th largest city/town ...
. Big Mick recovered and continued his reign at the Metallica console. His contract with Metallica supposedly states that he has to be called by his moniker, although amongst the band themselves he is known as Full Roar.
The live mixing technique he is often credited with is adding a high-mid "click" to the bass drum, which evolved early on with Metallica as a means of lifting Lars Ulrich's bass drums out of the bottom heavy sound. A more recent crusade is to encourage engineers to start soundchecks with ambient microphones (such as vocal microphones) working through to close-mic'd or gated instruments such as drums. This is in direct opposition to the usual soundcheck which starts with the kick drum and ends with the vocals, but actually makes a lot of sense since the final sound of any instrument is going to be the combination of the ambient and close microphones.
When not busy with Metallica, Hughes has worked with Halford,
Ozzy Osbourne
John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne (born 3 December 1948) is an English singer, songwriter, and television personality. He rose to prominence during the 1970s as the lead vocalist of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, during which period he adop ...
,
Def Leppard
Def Leppard are an English rock band formed in 1976 in Sheffield. Since 1992, the band has consisted of Rick Savage (bass, backing vocals), Joe Elliott (lead vocals), Rick Allen (drums, backing vocals), Phil Collen (guitar, backing vocals), ...
,
Queens of the Stone Age
Queens of the Stone Age (commonly abbreviated QOTSA) is an American Rock music, rock band formed in 1996 in Palm Desert, California. The band was founded by vocalist and guitarist Josh Homme, who has been the only constant member throughout mul ...
and
Steve Vai
Steven Siro Vai (; born June 6, 1960) is an American guitarist, composer, songwriter, and producer. A three-time Grammy Award winner and fifteen-time nominee, Vai started his music career in 1978 at the age of eighteen as a transcriptionist f ...
. He produced the album ''World Service'' for the rock band Radio Moscow in 1991. He managed
The Wildhearts
The Wildhearts are an English rock band, formed in 1989 in Newcastle upon Tyne. The band's sound is a mixture of hard rock and melodic pop music, often described in the music press as combining influences as diverse as the Beatles and 1980s- ...
in the 1990s and has worked with them live and in the studio since their reunion in 2002. After Metallica, the band he is most strongly associated with is Slipknot, who he has worked with between Metallica tours since 2001. He has even done sound for a Slipknot tribute act, Slip-not.
In 2007, he was asked to mix the FOH sound for the
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in London in 1968. The group comprised vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham. With a heavy, guitar-driven sound, they are ci ...
reunion concert at London's
O2 Arena O2 Arena may refer to:
*The O2 Arena (London)
*O2 Arena (Prague)
*The 3Arena
The 3Arena (originally The O2) is an indoor amphitheatre located at North Wall Quay in the Dublin Docklands in Dublin, Ireland. The venue opened as The O2 on 16 Decem ...
in conjunction with Robert Plant's personal vocal mixer, Roy Williams. They used the facilities of the Midas XL8
digital mixing console
In professional audio, a digital mixing console (DMC) is a type of mixing console used to combine, route, and change the dynamics, equalization and other properties of multiple audio input signals, using digital signal processing rather than a ...
to allow them to do this on a single desk. He intentionally did not use the clicky Metallica bass drum sound, preferring instead to update
Jason Bonham
Jason John Bonham (born 15 July 1966) is an English drummer. He is the son of late Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. Since his father's death in September 1980, he has performed with the surviving three members of Led Zeppelin on several occasi ...
's ambient and reverberant drum sound by using a mix of close and ambient drum microphones on his kit, brought into phase using a 3 or 4ms delay,Article in the June 2008 issue of Performing Musician And Live Sound World magazine (not online) and finished with a small amount of digital reverb.