The Group Soundbath Player Certification Course is built on more than 20 years of professional sound bath experience, more than 4,000 public group events, and eight years of teaching practitioners how to lead them. Jamie Bechtold and Robert Lee created this course because they lived every stage of building a sound bath practice from the ground up, and they built the training they wished had existed at the start.
About SoundbathPlayer
SoundbathPlayer exists to raise the standard of professional sound bath practice. The tagline is Play More, Play Better, and that is exactly what the brand is built around: education and resources focused on playing and leading sound baths at a professional level.
Everything taught about playing sound baths in SoundbathPlayer courses and trainings is based entirely on firsthand experience, as full-time players and teachers. The playing methods and techniques were not copied from anyone else’s teachings or adapted from existing frameworks. They were developed by Jamie Bechtold through more than 20 years and 4,000 group sound baths played in the real world, for a wide range of audiences, and structured into a teachable system by Jamie and Robert Lee.
The focus of SoundbathPlayer education is on building skilled, credible practitioners with real expertise. Not spiritual gurus. Not healers. SoundbathPlayer does not include or teach any specific spiritual or religious philosophy. The goal is to empower sound bath practitioners to know their instruments, understand what they are doing, and deliver a consistent, professional experience every time they play.
SoundbathPlayer currently offers the Group Soundbath Player Certification Course, instrument consultations, and supporting resources for practitioners at every stage. In the future the brand will expand to include additional courses, coaching, and professional development options. Jamie and Robert built SoundbathPlayer to be the place where quality and professionalism in the sound bath world have a home.
Where It Started
Jamie began offering private sessions in 2003, combining massage therapy with sound in the form of Himalayan singing bowls, drumming, and tuning forks. In 2004, she purchased her first crystal singing bowl and gong and began integrating them into her work, offering sound baths to private clients and small private groups. Her first public group sound bath was held in September 2006 at Crystal Matrix in Atwater Village, Los Angeles. Sound baths were new at the time. Less than a handful of practitioners were offering them as a service in Southern California, there was no established framework for leading group events, no curriculum for selecting instruments, and no professional standard for what a sound bath should deliver. Jamie built her method through years of full-time professional practice, drawing on her background in biology, acupuncture, massage therapy, yoga, music theory, and the physics of sound.
By 2011, she was leading monthly sound bath events at many yoga studios throughout Los Angeles and began integrating gongs and crystal bowls into live yoga classes. She became a Paiste Gong Artist that same year and began teaching private students how to play gongs and crystal singing bowls. What she was developing through thousands of professional events was a repeatable method for creating consistent, therapeutic-style sound bath experiences that work effectively across a wide range of audiences and environments.
The Soundbath Center and the First Practitioner Training
In March 2015, Jamie opened The Sound Space in Los Angeles, the first public venue in the city dedicated exclusively to gong and crystal bowl sound baths. That same year, she met Robert Lee. Robert had been working in fitness and wellness in Los Angeles since 1997 as a personal trainer specializing in strength training, gyrotonics, yoga, and pilates, and had been leading breathwork sessions for individuals and groups since 2010. Their first joint event, Breathwork SoundLab™, was held in June 2015. The combination of Jamie’s sound bath playing experience and Robert’s background in breathwork and designing structured, results-oriented wellness programs became the foundation for everything that followed.
In January 2017, The Sound Space was renamed The Soundbath Center. That same month, Jamie and Robert coined the term Soundbath Practitioner and launched the first Soundbath Practitioner Training, held January 28 and 29, 2017. It was the first course of its kind, focused specifically on teaching people how to lead professional group sound baths with gongs and crystal singing bowls. Before this, sound-based trainings taught students how to offer one-to-one sound healing or sound therapy sessions. Jamie and Robert created an entirely new category: practitioner training specifically for leading group sound bath events. The term Soundbath Practitioner has since been adopted widely across the field, and their original training structure has been widely replicated by others in the sound bath world.
The training ran under The Soundbath Center brand from 2017 through the end of 2020, then continued to evolve under the SoundbathPlayer name beginning in January 2021. Over the next three years it moved from an in-person format to a hybrid course and finally to a fully online program in 2024. Each iteration was enhanced, adding more content, refining teaching methods, and developing new ways to help students learn and retain what they were being taught. SoundbathPlayer as a standalone brand was the natural outcome of that process: the training had outgrown being a feature of a venue and needed its own identity.
Eight Years of Teaching, One Course Built to Last
Hundreds of students attended from across the United States and internationally over those eight years. A consistent pattern emerged: students who completed the in-person training often struggled to retain what they had learned once they returned home. The two-weekend, two-level format was attractive to participants, especially those traveling in, but it did not give students enough time to ingrain techniques, and most did not practice immediately after the course ended.
The solution was not a longer in-person format. It was a better-designed one. In 2024, Jamie and Robert refined the course and moved it entirely online. The improvement in student outcomes was immediate. Students could revisit lessons as many times as they needed, practice at their own pace, and return to difficult techniques until they actually landed. The online format also made the course accessible to students anywhere in the world, not just those willing to travel to Los Angeles. Jamie and Robert had not expected the online format to outperform in-person training, but the results made the case clearly: students learn the material and the techniques more thoroughly when they can work through them at their own pace.
The Group Soundbath Player Certification Course, launched in its current form in November 2025, is the result of that entire process: two decades of professional playing, eight years of teaching sound bath specific training, and a clear understanding of what students actually need to become capable, confident practitioners.
Jamie Bechtold
Jamie Bechtold has been playing sound baths with gongs and crystal singing bowls professionally since 2004. With more than 4,000 public group events across Los Angeles and Southern California, she is among the most experienced sound bath practitioners and educators in the United States. Her educational background includes a BS in Biology, training in acupuncture and massage therapy, yoga teacher training, and additional study in music theory, physics related to sound, Reiki, and energy work.
She has been featured in numerous U.S. publications, served as a Paiste Gong Artist, and appeared in Meinl Sonic Energy and Sweetwater promotional videos, as well as the Meinl Sonic Energy and Schlagwerk catalogs. In 2018, she and Robert established GongPlay® as a registered trademark, creating a signature branded sound bath experience. Jamie co-founded The Soundbath Center in Los Angeles and The Gong Room near Joshua Tree, California, making her one of the few practitioners in the world to have founded and operated two dedicated sound bath venues.
Teaching is something Jamie came to through the work itself. After watching hundreds of students go from uncertain beginners to confident practitioners, she knows how much a solid method shortens the learning curve. What took her a decade to develop through thousands of professional events, her students now learn in a matter of months. Her goal is to give every student the foundation that did not exist when she started.
Robert Lee
Robert Lee has worked in fitness and wellness since 1997 as a personal trainer specializing in strength training, gyrotonics, yoga, and pilates. Robert began leading breathwork sessions in 2010 and developed a signature rhythmic breathing method offered as both private and group experiences. He incorporated sound baths into his breathwork practice in 2015 and has contributed to the course structure and teaching methodology since its beginning. He and Jamie co-founded The Soundbath Center in Los Angeles and The Gong Room near Joshua Tree, California.
Robert’s contribution to the Group Soundbath Player Certification Course is the architecture behind it: the structure, the pacing, and the framework that guides students from beginner to capable practitioner in a clear, organized sequence. Where Jamie developed the playing techniques and methods through years of professional performance, Robert translated them into a teachable system that students can follow step by step, regardless of their starting point. His background in designing results-oriented programs is what makes the course feel logical to work through.
The Gong Room
In 2025, Jamie and Robert co-founded The Gong Room near Joshua Tree, California. The studio is dedicated to gong sound bath events, workshops, GongPlay® Practitioner Training, and in-person gong consultations for Group Soundbath Player students. The Gong Room operates separately from the Group Soundbath Player Certification Course but reflects the same commitment to professional, playing-focused sound bath practice that has defined their work since 2004.
