If you're in a band, chances are you've found that it's hard to coordinate and schedule multiple people for rehearsals.

And it gets even more complicated as you get older, throw married life in there, add in some children and other adult responsibilities.

That's why last weekend we took the opportunity to play at The Flagstaff Folk Festival, a town about four hours from Tucson.

Although the original reason for going was to play the gig, we stayed the whole weekend because of productivity.

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you put a band in a remote location far away from the day to day struggles of being alive.

It meant some serious practice time where we could completely focus on diving into the songs, figure out the arrangements and work on specific instrument parts.

All in all a smashing success if I do say so myself.

But the way we practiced reminded me of a certain way of mixing.

We have a set of about 30 songs that we practiced all the way through. The way we did it was to play each song, jot down all the things that we need to work on and then play the next song.

Once the 30 song set was over we would revisit each of the songs we actually needed to work on. Then we would focus on the specific parts of that song until we nailed it.

Rinse. Repeat.

This accomplished two things:

1. We made it through every song and could hear the set in its entirety without stopping.
2. We could focus on each song at the end to really fine-tune what needed work.

The way it reminded me of mixing can be broken down into similar two steps:

1. Focus on getting a rough mix of every single instrument in the song so you can hear the mix in its entirety.
2. Focus on minor adjustments and details at the end so you don't get lost in a rabbit hole of perfecting your snare sound automation.

By mixing the song as a whole first before you get crazy with the details means you can mix more efficiently as you waste less time in solo land for instance.

You've already got most of the mix going because you spent a lot of groundwork getting the song sounding as a whole. Now you can have fun fine-tuning your instruments to make them sound like a record, not just a rough mix.

I think it saves time looking at the big picture before you focus on the details.

See what that mentality can do to help out with your mixes.

For more big picture ideas and mix approaches I talk a lot more about mine in the Recording & Mixing Strategies Bundle here:

www.audio-issues.com/strategie