In 1977 Portrait Records put out Little Queen, and the single that carried it onto American radio opened on a riff of one long note and two short ones, repeated until the listener's pulse gave in and matched it. The Seattle band led by two sisters that took the gallop rhythm into the Billboard top twenty three years before Iron Maiden released a first album was Heart, and the song was "Barracuda", which climbed to number eleven on the Hot 100 while the guitars chewed through the car speakers of half a continent. Heavy metal did not invent the figure. It adopted it, and never let it leave the house.
Listen to "Barracuda" with the voice pushed to the back of your attention and the whole mechanism is exposed. The guitar lands hard on each beat, then fires two quick notes that tip it forward into the next one, and the drums lock onto the same shape, so that the song never strolls and never quite sprints. It leans. That lean is the whole trick.
The guitarist who has told the story of the riff most often is Nancy Wilson. In a 2019 interview she said Heart had been opening for a band in Europe that "had a hit with a Joni Mitchell song that they covered called 'This Flight Tonight' that had kind of that riff," and that Heart "borrowed" it. The Scottish quartet behind that record was Nazareth, whose hard rock cover of Joni Mitchell's "This Flight Tonight" came out in 1973. The pedigree runs from a folk song through a Scottish rock band to a Seattle single. Nobody along that line was playing heavy metal.
The gallop rhythm, counted
Written down, the figure is modest. Each beat of a bar in four is split into an eighth note followed by two sixteenths, so that a guitarist counting sixteenths aloud, one e and a, plays on the one, the and and the a, and lets the e go by in silence. Reverse it, two sixteenths and then the eighth, and the stress moves to the back of the beat. The shape is identical. The effect is not.
A banker mason dressing a block of limestone with a claw tool and a round wooden dummy works to the gallop without knowing its name, one full blow to bite the teeth into the face, two quick light taps to walk them forward, one full blow again, the tool chewing a skin of stone off the block a finger's width at a time and leaving rows of fine parallel scores behind it. The heavy stroke does the cutting. The two light ones move the blade.
That division of labour is what the notation cannot show. The long note carries the accent and the weight, while the two short notes behave as a pickup, an anacrusis in the old term, throwing their small momentum onto the next downbeat so that every beat arrives already pushed. In a straight run of eighth notes each beat has to start the engine again. In the gallop the engine never stops.
Anyone can learn the notes of a gallop in a minute. Keeping the two short ones even for four minutes takes years.
The picking hand and the missing upstroke
On guitar the figure lives in the picking hand. Played with strict alternate picking, the hand keeps moving down and up four times to every beat and simply misses the string on the second stroke, so the gallop comes out as down, then down and up, with a ghost stroke passing silently over the strings in the gap. The reverse gallop is down and up and down, with the silent stroke at the end. The rhythm is carried by the wrist, not the fingers.
Palm muting gives it teeth. With the edge of the hand resting on the strings right beside the bridge the long note thuds instead of ringing, the two short ones click like a ratchet, and a distorted low string turns the pattern into something closer to machinery than to melody. Lift the hand off for the last beat of a phrase and the riff blooms open again.
The rhythm guitarist who built an entire catalogue out of that one hand motion, playing gallops at tempos where most players fall back on straight sixteenths and keeping every downstroke the same weight as the one before it, was Jon Schaffer of Iced Earth, and the title song of the band's first album, released by Century Media in November 1990, runs on little else. The riff does not vary its rhythm for minutes at a stretch. It varies the notes and lets the hand grind on.
Speed is where the figure becomes a test of stamina. At a hundred and sixty beats a minute the sixteenths fall barely a tenth of a second apart, and the difference between a gallop that drives and one that smears is the evenness of those two short notes, which is a matter of hours spent with a metronome rather than of talent. Velocity without evenness produces a shuffle. Heavy metal has never wanted a shuffle.
From Maiden to the thrash bands
The East London band that turned the gallop from one device among many into a trademark was Iron Maiden, and the figure runs under its records from "Killers," the title track of the 1981 album, through "Run to the Hills" on The Number of the Beast in 1982. By the middle of the decade a young guitarist could not pick up a Maiden songbook without it. The rhythm had become a dialect.
Played under a whole band, the gallop behaves like a stamp mill on a gold field, the camshaft lifting one heavy iron stamp and dropping it on the ore, then two lighter ones hammering in behind it before the first has bounced, so that no blow ever waits for the one before it to finish landing. The riff moves the same way. Nothing lands alone.
The Bay Area quartet that carried the figure into thrash on its first album was Metallica, and on "The Four Horsemen", from Kill 'Em All, released by Megaforce in July 1983, the gallop drives the verse at a tempo Maiden rarely touched, before the band drops it for the slower middle section and then snaps back into it. The thrash bands that followed kept it and sped it up. It survived the acceleration better than almost anything else they inherited.
| Song | Band | Year | What the gallop does |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Barracuda" | Heart | 1977 | Carries a hard rock single onto the radio |
| "Killers" | Iron Maiden | 1981 | Drives the title track end to end |
| "The Four Horsemen" | Metallica | 1983 | Drives a thrash verse at speed |
| "Iced Earth" | Iced Earth | 1990 | Holds a whole riff for minutes at a time |
Why the figure outlived its fashions
The gallop sits exactly between the two rhythms heavy metal was torn between at birth. The blues shuffle splits the beat into a long note and a short one and swings; straight eighths split it evenly and march. The gallop keeps the straightness of the march and borrows the lean of the shuffle, which is why a figure first heard on a Seattle hard rock single could become the most recognisable rhythm in the whole relentless family without ever sounding like the blues it quietly replaced.
It also asks almost nothing of the rest of the band. A drummer doubles it on the bass drum, a bassist on one string, a singer rides over the top on long notes, and the whole group pushes forward as one body at a tempo a crowd can move to. Few devices do that much work for so little notation.
Two bass drum pedals turned it into a drum pattern as well. With a pedal under each foot a drummer can play the long note and both short ones on the kick alone, stamping the figure into the stage beneath the guitars, and the power metal bands of the late eighties and nineties laid whole choruses on top of that surface. The figure had stopped being a riff. It had become the ground the song stands on.
The harmony that sits on top of all this, the minor modes, the Phrygian half step and the harmonic minor of the neoclassical players, is taken apart in the metal scales. The rhythm underneath them is older than any of those names and harder to fake. Anyone can learn the notes of a gallop in a minute. Keeping the two short ones even for four minutes takes years.
Where the gallop fits beside the power chord, the tritone, the slackened string and the twin guitar line is set out in the wider story of how the music is built. Of all those parts, it is the only one you can hear from the next room with the television on and still name in a single bar.
