Introducing Spike AI

Soul and Feel: Spike AI brings the emotional magic of a great mix to musicians everywhere.

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.

“The mix is where the emotion happens. You have to mix so it connects emotionally,” explains Spike. “A mix can make an okay song sound like a hit record and engage the listener completely. It needs to give me the shivers. That’s when I know the feel and soul of the mix is really coming through.”

This feel and soul should be something everyone can reveal, believe Spike AI’s co-founders, Joshua Stent and Henry Ramsey, two long-time friends and music industry polymaths. Joshua, Spike’s son, learned to mix by his father’s side, yet decided to pursue his own music industry dreams, working in A&R at labels like Capitol Records. Henry has managed major names including Portugal. The Man and knows the recording process well, as he and his artists are constantly facing its thrills and hurdles. The two would often call each other from LA traffic to share their experiences. “We always knew we’d start a company together,” muses Joshua.

That day finally arrived when Joshua, who was living in England, came back to LA to visit. The friends began to imagine what it would take to translate Spike’s unique mixing expertise into a viable, accessible product for musicians. As AI progressed and models improved, they knew it was technically feasible. They began to work on Spike AI, eventually finding their first developer who also happened to be an artist and producer. They worked to train models using Spike’s extensive files showing what he did to each track.

Spike AI feels like a natural progression for Spike. Though he started producing records in the analog era, his approach to mixing has always involved embracing new technologies, while preserving key elements that make a mix sound amazing. He sees Spike AI as an extension of that process: “I started in studios with large format consoles and tape machines. The desk had a basic automation system, and we used that a bit, but we often had six people running the console. I’ve always been a fan of technology, and I love that I can use a hybrid system now,” one he developed by cutting his legendary “magic desk” in half to unite analog and digital tech, “but I can move stuff around and not get bogged down in a single set song.”

This open-minded approach to technological change has given Spike AI a deeply human goal: to make everyone’s tracks sound better. A better sound means fans can hear the artist or producer’s full intention and emotional statement. “It changes the way artists view their creativity when they feel good about their music. That’s what we thought about building this plugin and this sound. Artists can break into tears when the song is right,” says Henry, who’s observed this phenomenon with the artists he manages. “Spike AI is that last link that connects everything together as you’re creating your tracks. Josh and I have loved figuring all this out and are eager to hear how people use it.”

For more information please visit: https://www.spike-ai.com/









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