In July, Mix caught up with longtime Metallica front-of-house engineer “Big Mick” Hughes at London's new Wembley Stadium. It was the seventh show of the band's Escape from the Studio '07 tour, a concert for 70,000 fans following their performance at the Live Earth festival. Hughes chatted about his decades on the road, and getting over his fear of digital consoles — by helping design one.

Tell me about this tour.

This is Escape From the Studio. They tend to do this when they're doing an album — they just want to walk away occasionally, and go out and ‘play for a few friends.’ [Laughs]

It was a diverse Live Earth lineup last night. Did you scare the Pussycat Dolls' fans?

I did say to the band, “Look, I'm not going to crush like I would normally. It'll be a mild crush.” I appreciate there are people out there who wouldn't want to hear Metallica.

Is the mix pretty straightforward?

It's a rock band at the end of the day. I did Def Leppard and Ozzy and Slipknot — the heavier sounding the band, the harder it is to mix. Take Def Leppard: If there's a solo going on, everybody calms down and shuts up. But with these guys, if there's a solo, they all play harder. So it's not quite as easy as you think; there's a lot of juggling.

So you're riding the volume a lot?

Oh, I have to mix it constantly. But I'm also trying to capture an attitude. They created a type of sound in the beginning and we honed it together. Of course, I used to spend a lot of time with the band and we talked about stuff. It's funny now because we haven't talked about sound for many years.

You guys are like family.

What are they going to say to me after 23 years? If it's not sounding good, they'll know I'm trying my hardest to sort it out. And when it's right, then we're all roaring together.

What is James [Hetfield, vocalist/guitarist] singing into?

[Audio-Technica] AE5400s. They're all Audio-Technica mics — 2500s on guitars, 5400s on vocals, ATM35s on toms and “under heads,” 23s on top of the snare, 451 on the bottom, 451 on the hi-hat.

What are you doing to his vocal channel?

James has a really powerful voice and a hugely dynamic mic technique. In the midrange, he makes a lot of 630 Hz. So once you've chunked that out and tweaked a few other EQ points, then he sounds fine. I also use an RMS averaging compressor [the adaptive compressor on the Midas XL8] at about 3:1 with a moderate attack and a gain reduction of about 6 dB. This smooths out the dynamics a little, but still allows the performance to shine through.

Is the whole band on in-ears?

In-ears and wedges. Most bands, when you get in-ears, you get rid of the monitor speaker system. Metallica never gets rid of anything; they just add. James' statement was great: He said, “We need wedges.” I said, “Why?” He goes, “For guitar feedback. I can't hold the guitar up to my ear!”

How many inputs are you working with?

Total number of input channels from the stage is 48, including six triggers. There's “pyro playback,” there's the VT playback, so I think it's like 38 channels of band.

You're a fan of Midas boards. How did you get involved developing the XL8?

I did 11 years of XL4. I bought my own desk; it was lovely. But they can't make them anymore [due to Europe's Reduction of Hazardous Substances Initiative]. To be honest, there are no other new big analog boards about, and I thought, “Well, it's probably time to step into the 21st century and take a walk on the digital side.” I had a couple of boards at home to play with and didn't like the sound; didn't like the way they felt. So I thought, “I'd better get involved in making one.”

What did you want out of the console?

Something I could use. The ergonomics of it, the feel of quality, like the XL4. I also wanted to remove the scary bit about getting sound out of it, because some of these things, it's like you've got to play Battleship with them to get the sound in or out.

So they were mid-swing when you came in?

Oh, yeah. [Midas XL4 designer] Alex Cooper sat there for six months-plus, listening to a wood block, among other things. He had an XL4 EQ and other EQs for comparison and he modeled the new XL8 EQ in the analog world. Then the digital boys came in and turned these analog plots into digital, and then it was stuck together with Lego bricks and bits of wire for him to do further listening. I sat there with him a few times, and it's pretty soul destroying, actually, to sit there and listen to a wood block go dik dik for 12 hours a day. [Laughs]

And then I'd come in, and say, “You should press this button and touch these and it should all work,” and they all go, “That's 150,000 lines of code to sort through.”

And they're not making the console just for you…

Yeah, yeah, I just have to back off sometimes and realize that they have other agendas afoot, not just mine. So we've pulled and pushed, and they've accommodated me as much as they could. It's made a fantastic console; it brings channels to you — you don't have to go to channels anymore.

So you've spent literally half your life with Metallica. What kind of effect does that have?

Drives you insane. [Laughs]