An Evening with Tom Longworth at Studiocare, Liverpool
On the evening of Thursday 24 September, Tom Longworth joined us at Studiocare in Liverpool for a Mix Masterclass. The evening began at 6.30pm with a talk from PMC, followed by an hour-long mix walkthrough with Tom.
The evening was built around a single song: Tom’s mix of “All I Ever Asked” by Rachel Chinouriri featuring Sombr. PMC is a British studio monitor manufacturer, and its monitors are widely used in mixing and mastering rooms. We stock the PMC range at Studiocare.
What is mixing?
Mixing is the stage where the recorded parts of a song are brought together into a single, balanced whole. By the time a track reaches the mix, the performances have been captured and the arrangement is settled. The work is to decide how those parts sit against each other: what leads, what supports, and how much room each one is given.
It is a craft of small decisions. Level, tone, dynamics and space all interact, and a change to one affects the others. A good mix should serve the song first, and it should still hold together when it is heard on a phone, in a car, or on studio monitors.
What does a mix engineer do?
A mix engineer takes the multitrack recording and turns it into the version of the song that gets released. That means balancing the individual parts, shaping tone with equalisation, controlling dynamics with compression, and using effects such as reverb and delay to place everything in a space.
The role is as much about judgement as technique. The engineer works to the artist’s and producer’s intentions for the record, and spends much of the time listening rather than processing: comparing options, checking the mix on different systems, and deciding when a part needs to come forward and when it is better left alone.
Who is Tom Longworth?
After graduating from LIPA, Tom worked as an in-house engineer and producer at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, where he found his passion and talent for mixing. He has since built a wide-ranging discography, mixing for The Royston Club, Gavin James, 220 Kid, David Guetta, Sundara Karma, Oscar Lang, Rachel Chinouriri and Sombr.
Rachel Chinouriri is a two-time BRIT Award nominee, and in 2025 Tom won the MPG ‘Album of the Year’ award for his mix work on her album What A Devastating Turn Of Events.
That list runs from dance and pop through to guitar-led records, which is a reminder that mixing is not a genre-specific craft. What changes between those songs is the material and what it needs. What stays the same is the discipline of listening.
What did the evening cover?
The walkthrough was given over to one song. Tom broke down his mix of “All I Ever Asked”, the track he mixed for Rachel Chinouriri featuring Sombr.
Hearing a released record unpicked in that way is different from reading about the process, because the choices behind it become audible as decisions rather than results. For anyone who had read about mixing but never sat in on a session, that proximity was the point: it is one thing to know that a mix involves balance, equalisation and compression, and another to follow a record being worked through by the person who mixed it.
How the night ran
The masterclass was at Studiocare, 56 Evans Road, Liverpool L24 9PB, on the evening of Thursday 24 September. It began at 6.30pm with the PMC talk, and the hour-long walkthrough with Tom followed.
The room seats thirty people, and tickets were free. Seats were limited to one per person, so anyone attending as a group registered for an individual ticket each.
Details of the evening are still on the Tom Longworth - Mix Masterclass @ Studiocare product page.