This past weekend was an exhausting exercise in friendly responsibilities.

I ended up going to two weddings in two different states over the course of the weekend.

First one was in Phoenix, Arizona on Saturday and the second one was in Long Beach, California the following day. After partying all night on Saturday, we got up on Sunday, caught a flight to California and made it just in time for the 3 PM Sunday ceremony. I almost didn't take off my suit the entire time since there was hardly any point.

My wife and I are friends with a lot of lawyers because she went to law school, so some of these weddings can get pretty extravagant.

One of them was so large that a child even got lost at the reception!

Here's what happened:

After the ceremony and cocktail hour on Saturday, we were all instructed to go down into the ballroom, where we found our tables and starting chatting with strangers and friends alike. Out of the corner of my eye, I see this little boy walking by himself. I sense that there's something off so I keep observing from across the room.

This child was roaming around the dance floor while all the guests were milling about, either ordering more drinks or trying to figure out which table they were supposed to sit at. He keeps looking up at the adults around him, getting more anxious by the minute. His tiny little feet stomp slightly harder with each step as he channels his frustration into the ground through his heels.

The adults slowly disperse, leaving him alone on the dance floor. Luckily, he's right by the DJ who seems to be more attentive than the parents that sired him because he quickly realizes what's happening and announces it through the PA system.

I mean, I used to get lost at supermarkets all the time when I was a kid because I'd go wander off down the candy aisle but this was a wedding!

You'd think that it would be hard to lose a child at a wedding ballroom but at a 260 guest count, somebody's bound to get overlooked.

Long story short, this boy didn't get a chance to learn any cool DJ tricks as a grandparent-like figure quickly appeared and whisked him away.

It's similar to how you can lose sight of the most important thing in the mix. You might get wrapped up in the percussion, guitar solo or keyboard pads but if you forget the most important part of the arrangement, your mix will suffer for it.

The same can be said about focusing too much on fancy processing and expensive plug-ins to get a great mix when all you need are the five plug-ins you already have in your DAW.

It's something I've been relearning lately because I'm setting up my new studio computer and only installing the plug-ins I use the most. Unsurprisingly, the biggest bulldozers I come back to again and again are EQ, compression, reverb, delay, and saturation.

Those are the processors I use to make professional sounding mixes, and I can't stress enough how important they are to master.

If you need to take your mixes to the next level, a good place to start is with my Amazon best-selling book, Step By Step Mixing.

Or...if you want something even more in-depth, the video version of Step By Step Mixing is my flagship course, Mixing With 5 Plug-ins.