So you think you’re a versatile string player, with good technique and a feeling for rhythms and melodies in different musical styles. But are you versatile enough to play your instrument like a snare drum?

You can do it, once you’ve mastered a bow stroke called the chop. It’s a percussive technique essential to playing solos and backup in bluegrass bands, and useful in a variety of other styles, including jazz and some contemporary art music. Fiddler Richard Greene spread the chop through the bluegrass world in the 1960s and continues to make good use of it in solo work. Violinist Darol Anger is the acknowledged modern master of chopping, but prefers to restrict chopping to accompaniment. Anger’s playing is well known through his work with the American Fiddle Ensemble, David Grisman Quintet, the Turtle Island String Quartet, the Montreux Band, and the Anger/Marshall Band. Every year at the Mark O’Connor Fiddle Conference he holds a “chop shop” class.

“The chop plays the same role as the drums and rhythm guitar together,” Anger says. “But it can’t duplicate an entire drum set, so usually with chopping you’re hearing the equivalent sound of the high hat and the snare part mixed in, which supplies a propulsion that you don’t get in any other way, especially in a quartet situation. A lot of quartets now are doing arrangements of pop music and jazz, and without some kind of percussive part it sounds like many of the tracks of the original piece have been removed.”

The chop’s snare-drum effect is obtained by throwing the bow down onto the strings in a controlled way, and quickly pulling it back up. Anger credits Greene with figuring out a way to get an effective but essentially toneless sound on both the downstroke and upstroke; Anger and his Turtle Island colleagues later developed a way to get an honest-to-goodness musical note along with the percussive sound on the upstroke.

“It’s almost a marcato kind of sound,” Anger says. He has since taught himself to get a note on the downstroke, too, which opens up all manner of rhythmic and harmonic possibilities in an ensemble.

But Anger stresses that the basic chop remains a percussive effect used to propel the rhythm in any number of patterns. It’s not something you want to overdo, though; he points out that playing too many syncopated beats, chops or otherwise, can confuse the melody players.

“The technique itself can really damage both the music and your reputation if you use it without sensitivity,” he says. “The technique is not a toy. This sound, which is very close to noise, needs to be used with restraint to help the groove of the tune. The less you do, generally, the better it sounds.

“In my conception, it’s a backup technique, which means you’re not playing louder than the foreground melody; you’re weaving into the rest of what’s going on, playing just enough to convey the tone quality of the piece and the feeling of the groove, maybe down to just one chop per bar.”