De-Feedback Plugin for Working Musicians: More Gain, Less Feedback with Devin Sheets
Episode Ep 524 1 hr 20 min

De-Feedback Plugin for Working Musicians: More Gain, Less Feedback with Devin Sheets

You’re invited into a legacy family audio business that refused to accept “good enough” on feedback control and instead chased the impossible: a truly zero‑latency, AI‑driven way to push your PA louder without squeals. You follow Devin Sheets from growing up on sound gigs to roaming European stages, then back home to build De‑Feedback plugin for working musicians, a live sound feedback plugin and on‑the‑fly impulse‑response generator that listens like a seasoned engineer: separating human voice, room reverb, background noise, and feedback in real time so you can grab at least 6 dB more gain before things start to howl. Along the way you see how NAMM sparked the idea, how inverse impulse responses and probability math beat old EQ and gate tricks, and how “homebrew AI” meant sneaking into every empty church at 3 a.m. just to teach the model what real rooms actually sound like.

You also learn how to think like a modern working musician: using social media to find the right AI programmers across the world, leaning on LLMs to translate, collaborate, and even rate contractor work so you can move faster without losing control. You come away knowing you can drop a dedicated De‑Feedback box or plugin into almost any rig, from churches to touring consoles to tiny clubs, take it with you even when someone else is behind the board, and quietly stack the deck in your favor. In the end, it’s a roadmap for how you run your own gigs and career: stay curious, embrace new tools, protect your sound, and Always Be Performing.

  • 00:00:00 Gig Gab 524 – Monday, March 9th, 2026
  • 00:02:12 Let’s Grow this Legacy Family Business
    • Grew up doing sound
    • Also a musician
    • Lived in Europe
    • Then came back and said, “let’s grow this family business!”
  • 00:03:44 We haven’t “just solved” this feedback problem
    • Went to NAMM for the first time, and was inspired
    • There are automated EQ-based or gate-based systems
    • PSE plugin from Waves
    • 5045 for feedback
  • 00:04:57 Why isn’t there a “balanced audio”-type solution for Feedback
    • Balanced Audio fixes hums and it just works.
  • 00:08:24 NAMM is a great inspiration…and it inspired Devin and his team to seek a feedback plugin solution
  • 00:12:35 Training the AI to listen for three things: human voice, reverb, and feedback
    • Created a de-reverb algorithm and went beyond that
    • A probability calculation does the math
  • 00:16:05 Truly zero latency for the plugin
    • Workflow latency remains
  • 00:19:32 I don’t have any coding or AI background, but I have a gut feeling AI will fix this feedback problem
    • Others: It’s harder than you think
    • Devin: I knew that it needed to happen
  • 00:20:58 Finding an AI programmer who was interested in doing
    • Experimented with some programmers, failed, learned some things!
  • 00:21:09 Social Media to the rescue!
    • Late 2023: Devin found a group of AI programmers who would be interested
    • Sending large amounts of money to China…it’s a risk!
  • 00:26:30 At 3am, a text message: I think I’ve done it.
    • Devin immediately started testing it himself
    • “It seemed to work.”
  • 00:27:17 Installing De-Feedback in Churches
  • Sponsors
  • 00:34:20 What is an impulse response?
    • Impulse Response: An audio picture of how

Community discussion