There are around a hundred top-tier mixing engineers in the world, and each of them can work on approximately 300 hundred tracks a year. Yet there are tens of millions of tracks released annually. What if they all got a great mix?
Spike AI is here to answer that question, translating the decades of experience of legendary mixing engineer Spike Stent into an AI model that can turn a meh mix into moving music. This model draws on Spike’s deep knowledge of mixing which has been applied to everyone from The Beatles to Beyonce, from Post Malone and Oasis to Ed Sheeran and Harry Styles, Spike AI is currently in beta and plans to launch Q1 of 2025 (spike-ai.com).
Spike AI has created what may be one of the largest, most robust mix datasets. It lives as a plugin within artists and producers’ digital audio workstations (DAWs), letting the mix happen right where the music gets made and eliminating time-sucking bounces. Spike AI users can interact with the AI model via chatbot, asking it to tweak a mix in natural language and unlocking its full potential without deep technical or musicological knowledge. Artists and producers can access Spike AI using a credit system—one minute is one token—that means a great mix can be achieved at an extremely reasonable price.
The results are so good that Spike himself was blown away. “I’m a great champion of moving forward, including when it comes to tech. It became very clear when I worked on the AI Beatles record: People are going to be doing this,” he reflects. “We wanted to offer something unique that everyone can access. That’s what’s so brilliant about Spike AI. It lets people create something new that will help artists and producers who don’t have the option of hiring someone like me.”
Though producers and managers know what a great mix can do, music fans may not be familiar with the mixing process and what makes it so important to a track’s final sound. Mixing is the crucial stage between laying down tracks and getting them polished for release via mastering. As a sought-after mixing engineer, Spike gets called in to take a recorded track to the next level or to address a problem, when a song just doesn’t quite click. Yet there’s more to it than technical adjustments and levels. For Spike, a good mix hits in the feels.
