Galloping For Metal Guitar: Beginner Lesson & Exercises

Galloping riffs are based on two fundamental rhythm guitar techniques. You’ll be combining palm muting with alternate picking. It’s also a method that makes your riffs sound more metal.

Learning how to gallop on guitar opens up endless possibilities for you. You’ve got thrash metal songs like Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ to melodic death metal songs like Amon Amarth’s ‘The Way of Vikings’ to classic rock songs like Heart’s ‘Barracuda.’

After reading and going through the exercises in this post, you will:

• Be able to play the most difficult parts of your favorite metal songs
• Be better overall at alternate picking
• Have more accuracy in your metal rhythm playing
• Be able to play faster riffs
• Gain more ideas and creativity for writing your own metal riffs

How To Count The Gallop

Playing metal gallops isn’t as complicated as it sounds. At a high level, it’s just three notes played with alternated picking.

The tricky part is there’s a specific timing and rhythmic pattern to it. The way to describe it is it’s a snappy picking method. Listen to the short audio below:

Listen for the ‘1-2-3’ with a slight delay after the 3rd note.

Isn’t galloping the same as alternate picking? In theory, yes but the timing and count is where you hear the difference.

The first two galloping notes that are played together are 16th notes. This is a downstroke followed by an upstroke played quickly and snappy. The third and final note is an 8th note, which makes note to be held out a little longer.

Is galloping on guitar the same as playing triplets? No, they’re not the same.
I actually got this wrong on a YouTube lesson video that I made in 2019 but people still got the point.

One of the best explanations on triplets come from a country guitar website.

 A triplet is a rhythm that involves playing three notes in the space of two. In other words, three evenly spaced notes in the space of two notes that have the same rhythmic value.

Music Theory Lesson: Triplets: https://countryguitaronline.com/music-theory-how-to-play-triplets/

Again, the notes picked within the gallop are not all the same. The count for galloping is a quick 1-2-3 but that third note is held out longer before continuing either another gallop or another part of the riff (we’ll get to mixing other components with the gallop in the exercises later).

How To Play The Gallop

Here’s what metal galloping on guitar is in a nutshell:

• Alternate picking 1-2-3
• There’s a slight delay after the 3rd note
• Downstroke – upstroke – downstroke
• Quick and snappy

Galloping Picking Hand Angle

First, let’s talk about what I feel the most important aspect of galloping is and that’s the angle of your picking hand.

What I’ve found to be helpful is to notice the natural direction of your picking hand while alternate picking. Not just galloping, but alternate picking, in general.

You may notice that you have a tendency to pick in the direction towards your guitar bridge. This isn’t an extreme position but you will probably naturally hold your pick in a way that flows in that direction.

When you’re playing all downstrokes, you may notice the opposite; that your pick gravitates at an angle towards the neck. Again, this is not in an extreme sense but just slightly off from picking straight down (or straight back and forth when alternate picking).

This is ok. So don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. Allow room for natural tendencies such as this.

How to Hold Your

Now, let’s talk about how to hold your pick. There is no right or wrong way. I know…that didn’t help at all.

I hold my guitar pick with my first two fingers on the top and thumb on the other side of the pick. I’ve tried other ways but this works best for me. However, I know great guitarists who only use their thumb and index finger.

My advice is to go with what feels most natural and comfortable to you. That may (or may not) change over time.

Pick Gauge

What’s the best pick gauge or size for galloping? This is another personal preference. I know…that doesn’t help much either!

I can only share my experience with you. For over two decades, I play with Dunlop .60mm picks. I eventually moved up to .88mm and sometimes play with 1.0mm. And I like the Dunlop Max Grips.

But I know many metal guitar that play with thicker picks like 1.5mm, 2.0mm. and some even higher. It’s good to play around with different gauges and see what feels best of you. And give yourself permission to change if you ever feel you need to, like I did.

Galloping Fast VS Slow

Does galloping have to be played fast? Not necessarily. But you may not get the same effect if you play it slow. As I mentioned, galloping is based on a quick and snappy alternate picking technique.

You don’t have to play like you’re in a guitar competition. It’s not (or at least it should not be) who can play the fastest). It’s about what serves the song best.

You may also want to experiment with slower gallops. This could indeed work for sub genres like doom metal or sludge metal.

When writing your own metal riffs, instead of thinking about speed consider the type of sound, emotion, and experience you want your riffs to have when others hear them. Sometimes that may call for faster playing.

Other times it may mean you want more of a smooth and steady gallop. There’s no right or wrong way. There is only what you feel serves your song best.

***If you’re a beginner, click here instead

Galloping Exercises For Metal Guitar

It’s time to practice some riffs with galloping. There are three exercises below and each exercise will expand a little adding more notes to the riff. The goal is to not just get better at this metal guitar method but to implement as if you were playing a real song.

***All exercises are in E standard tuning.

Exercise 1

This first is a simple galloping exercise for a complete beginner at 140 BPM (beats per minute). It’s based on repeating the gallops but also has you playing the F and G power chords during the riff.

Exercise 2

This next exercise is a little faster at 155 BPM. And you’re not just playing the galloping technique. You’re adding two downstrokes on the open E string before each gallop.

You’re also adding more power chords by playing a B-C-B and D-E flat-D. Again, this is to make it feel more like a song than just an exercise.

Exercise 3

This final exercise is even faster at 163 BPM. And the galloping is also mixed with an additional downstroke but the downstroke is played once after each galloping pattern. You’ll follow that with some single note riffs.

Create Your Own Galloping Riffs Based on these Exercises

I encourage you to practice these exercises. But once you can play them, don’t stop there. I want you to expand on them and here are a few ways to do that:

• Play these riffs at different tempos (you can set a click track or use a drum program in your DAW).
• For exercise 1, play different power chords other than what’s in the exercise. Spread those power chords out so you’re not playing in the same spot on the fretboard.
• For exercise 2, try adding more power chords and moving those around more. And ‘break the rules’ so to speak (there are NO RULES, btw!). Play some power chords that don’t seemingly fit. Experiment.
• For exercise 3, go crazy with this one. Add more single notes, play the single note progression in reverse, play the progression somewhere different, or just go wild with it. Get creative.
• You can also change the patterns of how we’re mixing more downstrokes in with the galloping technique.

Continue Making Progress with Metal Riffs & Galloping

Getting good at galloping on guitar allows you to play almost any metal riff. Most of the complex riffs use this technique.

You also open the door to a new realm of creativity in writing your own riffs once you have mastered the almighty gallop. That’s one of the key things we focus on here at Metal Mastermind – creating your own sound.

To help you further, we have metal guitar courses for you to check out below:

***If you’re a beginner, click here instead