Studying with Murray Spivack (Chad Wackerman)

I was 12 years old when I started studying with Murray. It was a long, long time ago, but what he
showed me is what I still practice. Murray only believed in teaching hands and reading. He was a
great teacher for reading, and many LA players and players all over the country would come to
him for lessons to get their hands straightened out.

When we met for my first lesson, he asked me to play the most basic things. The setup was a
practice pad, a mirror, a clock, and a metronome. I thought I could play rolls and paradiddles and
things, but in ten minutes, he proved to me quickly what I couldn’t play. Before that, I had studied
with my father and had taken scattered lessons from various drummers, but it wasn’t methodical.
It was random. Murray taught me the fundamentals.

Murray showed me a way to play where the outcome of putting in all this work meant that
drumming was suddenly easy. I wasn’t having to struggle. I wasn’t having to work anymore. He
had a system that involved a lot of economy of motion and relaxation. One of his mottos was
that the faster you play, the more relaxed you have to be, which is the opposite of what
everybody does. Everyone pushes and tries to power through, but he said, no, if you play
systematically with his system and then go through all these exercises playing relaxed, you will
get faster and faster, but you learn to stay at that relaxed feel so you’re never sweating. You
never have to muscle anything because he had a lot of tricks to get a lot of power without using
big arm motions.

Murray taught me that drumming is comprised of four small basic elements. It’s single-strokes,
or you can call them wrist strokes. The second element is a rebound, where you’d have a wrist
and a throw or multiple throws. The third element would be flams. The fourth element is the closed
roll. He said anything else you play is just sequences of these things that come before or after. We
will get into a few other elements, but as far as what you can play, you can play anything with
these four elements.

The only reason I got through playing really loud with Frank Zappa for all those years with 3
months of rehearsals, 8 hours per day at full volume, 2-1/2 hour sound checks, and shows was
because of Murray. I never had any muscle problems. My hands never got sore. Murray gave you
everything you needed, and then it was up to you. He didn’t believe in teaching style, but he
taught you the fundamentals and mechanics and how to read well. He used to say, “I’ll teach
your brain, and your hands will follow.”

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