We present the formalism and demonstrate the use of the overlapping muffin-tin approximation (OMTA). This fits a full potential to a superposition of spherically symmetric short-ranged potential wells plus a constant. For one-electron potentials of this form, the standard multiple-scattering methods can solve Schr{o}dingers equation correctly to 1st order in the potential overlap. Choosing an augmented-plane-wave method as the source of the full potential, we illustrate the procedure for diamond-structured Si. First, we compare the potential in the Si-centered OMTA with the full potential, and then compare the corresponding OMTA $N$-th order muffin-tin orbital and full-potential LAPW band structures. We find that the two latter agree qualitatively for a wide range of overlaps and that the valence bands have an rms deviation of 20 meV/electron for 30% radial overlap. Smaller overlaps give worse potentials and larger overlaps give larger 2nd-order errors of the multiple-scattering method. To further remove the mean error of the bands for small overlaps is simple.
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