Dave Weckl was born on January 8, 1960, in St. Louis, Missouri. His parents were not professional musicians, but his mother loved music and his father played piano as a hobby. He started on drums at eight, playing along to records in a spare room and later in the living room, sometimes with his father at the piano. He first practiced to rock records by the Monkees and Creedence Clearwater Revival, then turned to Jack Sperling, Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson, Philly Joe Jones, and Steve Gadd. In high school he won several awards from the National Association of Jazz Educators with his school's jazz band, began working with local groups at 16, and studied with the St. Louis-area teachers Bob Matheny, John DiMartino, and Joe Buerger.

In 1979 he moved east to the University of Bridgeport, where he studied jazz, and by about 1980 he was working in New York with a fusion band called Nite Sprite. Its gigs at clubs such as the Bottom Line and 7th Avenue South drew the notice of Steve Khan, Michael Brecker, and Peter Erskine. Erskine recommended him for French Toast, a Latin-leaning band that included the pianist Michel Camilo and the bassist Anthony Jackson and became the Camilo group. Jackson in turn recommended him for the 1983 reunion tour of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, which Modern Drummer covered in its April 1984 "Up and Coming" column. The exposure led to a stream of New York studio work, including jingles and soundtrack sessions and records with George Benson, Peabo Bryson, Diana Ross, and Robert Plant. A NAMM oral history entry lists Madonna among the pop artists who hired him, though it names no title. Among his early jazz-side recordings are guitarist Bill Connors's Step It (1984), saxophonist Gerry Niewood's Share My Dream (1985), and Mike Stern's Upside Downside (1986).

In 1985 Chick Corea, who had seen him playing with Connors's group, hired him for the Elektric Band he was forming, a move that Brecker and others had also encouraged. With the bassist John Patitucci, he anchored a rhythm section that recorded The Chick Corea Elektric Band (GRP, 1986) and then, once guitarist Frank Gambale and saxophonist Eric Marienthal joined, Light Years (1987), which won the Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance in 1988. Eye of the Beholder (1988), Inside Out (1990), and Beneath the Mask (1991) completed that lineup's run. Weckl is credited as associate producer on Light Years, and his big kit of acoustic drums plus electronic pads became a model for a generation of drummers. In parallel, Corea formed the Akoustic Band as a piano trio with Patitucci and Weckl; its 1989 GRP debut, Chick Corea Akoustic Band, won the 1990 Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group, and the trio followed it with the live Alive (1991). During these years he also kept up studio work and played with the GRP All-Star Big Band, assembled by Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen, whose album All Blues won the 1995 Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.

His first record as a leader, Master Plan (GRP, 1990), was co-written and produced with his St. Louis friend, the keyboardist Jay Oliver. It reached number 9 on Billboard's Top Contemporary Jazz Albums chart, and its title track, written by Corea, put Weckl and Gadd on drums together with Jackson on bass. Heads Up (1992) and Hard-Wired (1994) followed on GRP. Alongside the records he built an instructional catalog that became as influential as his playing: the play-along package Contemporary Drummer + One, the DCI videos Back to Basics (1988) and The Next Step (1990), and later, after studying with the teacher Freddie Gruber, the three-part A Natural Evolution video series. In 1994 he was one of the drummers on the Neil Peart-produced tribute Burning for Buddy, playing with the Buddy Rich Big Band, and after leaving Corea's electric band he recorded and toured heavily with Stern.

In 1998 he launched the Dave Weckl Band, which began with Oliver, the guitarist Buzz Feiten, and the bassist Tom Kennedy and became a quartet of Weckl, Kennedy, the keyboardist Steve Weingart, and the saxophonist Brandon Fields by Transition, with Gary Meek taking over the saxophone chair for Multiplicity. It released Rhythm of the Soul (1998), Synergy (1999), Transition (2000), Perpetual Motion (2002), the double live set Live (And Very Plugged In) (2003), and Multiplicity (2005), all on Stretch Records with Corea as executive producer. He rejoined Corea for the Elektric Band's To the Stars (2004) and its later reunion tours, and toured with the Akoustic Band until Corea's death on February 9, 2021. In 2014 he reunited with Oliver for the crowd-funded Convergence, which drew more than 2,000 pre-orders and included a remake of Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground," and in 2015 he formed the Dave Weckl Acoustic Band with Kennedy, Meek, and the pianist Makoto Ozone, releasing Of the Same Mind and a live DVD. He opened the Dave Weckl Online School in 2016, and after reuniting the Dave Weckl Band for a 2019 concert at the Chesterfield Amphitheater in St. Louis (later released as a live album) he moved back to his hometown in 2021 to build a new studio. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2000. As of November 2026 his own site lists club, clinic, and festival dates running into 2027, among them dates with the guitarist Oz Noy and the singer Chrissi Poland, with Patitucci and the pianist Joey Calderazzo, and with the Dave Weckl/Tom Kennedy Project.

Weckl is a technically exacting fusion drummer whose reputation rests on precise time, fast hands and feet, and a systematic approach to a large kit that mixed acoustic drums with electronic pads. His early models were the big-band and bebop players Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson, and Philly Joe Jones, and Steve Gadd, who was widely seen as his example and who played alongside him on Master Plan. At the height of the Elektric Band, Modern Drummer reported that drum sets were being designed and sold to his configuration and that players everywhere were copying his approach. In the 1990s he reworked his technique with Freddie Gruber toward a more relaxed, efficient motion, which became the basis of his teaching. Critics have been less uniform than drummers: reviewers praised Master Plan as a showcase of his range from Corea to straight jazz to funk, while another found the writing less imaginative than the drumming, and AllMusic places his work between fusion, crossover jazz, and post-bop. Beyond the fusion records, the Akoustic Band trio recordings with Chick Corea and John Patitucci and the Dave Weckl Acoustic Band show a straight-ahead small-group side that the electric records rarely do.