Gallop (metal rhythm)
The gallop is a rhythmic pattern central to metal, made of one eighth note followed by two sixteenth notes within a single beat, almost always played with palm muting and a fast down-up pick stroke on the two sixteenths. Its name comes from the resemblance to a galloping horse's hoofbeats.
A common mix-up: it's not a triplet
The gallop is often wrongly called a "triplet" because it also splits the beat into three attacks: in reality, a triplet divides the beat into three strictly equal parts, while the gallop is asymmetrical (one eighth note twice as long as each of the two sixteenths that follow) — playing the gallop's three notes at perfectly equal intervals doesn't sound like a real gallop.
Guitarshelf's metal gallop riff in E minor and its gallop pedal power riff apply this pattern directly.
Practical tips and common mistakes
- Don't count the gallop "1-2-3" at equal intervals like a triplet: think of it instead as one eighth note followed by a fast down-up pick stroke — the rhythmic feel is different, not just the counting.
- Palm muting needs to stay constant across all three notes, not just the two sixteenths: a gallop that alternates muted and open loses its consistency and its percussive punch.
- Start very slowly, exaggerating the uneven durations (long eighth, two short sixteenths), before speeding up: speeding up an imprecise gallop just plays the mistake faster, it doesn't fix it.
- The gallop is almost always played with a fast down-up stroke on the two sixteenths, never all-downstroke across all three notes — unlike the shuffle, another asymmetrical feel, but built on a triplet, not on an eighth-plus-sixteenths pattern.