I’m Rosie, I’m a first going-into-second year English Literature and History student. Despite my degree, I somehow ended up on the Collaborative Research Internship, “Untold Histories of The Wicker Man”.
My first exposure to The Wicker Man was people joking about it. I went to a pretty alternative school, and when I was there, a lot of people “on the outside” would say, “Damn, that place sounds like The Wicker Man”. That’s not to say that we were committing human sacrifices, but we had a lot of peculiar traditions that were pretty strange to outside onlookers. We had these eight events every year called “festivals”, two per season. One of the songs we sang for the summer solstice festival was a 13th century folk song called “Sumer Is Icumen in” (“Summer Is Coming in”). We all learnt the proper pronunciation of the song in Middle English, and how to sing it in the round with all its proper parts. I can still sing it correctly today (although I can’t sing for anything). “Sumer Is Icumen in” is notable for a couple of reasons – it’s one of the oldest surviving songs with a known melody in the English language, one of the earliest secular songs found in the British Isles, and, importantly here, it’s the song sung by the Summer Isle villages as they burn the poor hapless policeman to death in the final scene of The Wicker Man. Yeah.
So, when I heard about this internship I knew I had to go for it, and I also knew that I wanted to propose something new, unique, probably beyond my expertise: a cover of “Sumer Is Icumen in”. My proposal was, surprisingly, accepted. Knowing I was out of my depth, I enlisted the help of two very interesting acquaintances of mine. One was a former classmate from my Wickermaniac school, a semi-professional folk singer called Oonagh-Mason Butcher. The other was the man who taught me to ride a bike, and, more importantly here, a hurdy-gurdy player – Matthew Williams.
I had never produced music before this point. I decided right away to use Adobe Audition as my recording software, as I’m pretty fortunate to have access to a student plan for some applications on the Adobe Suite. I got myself a Shure SM-57 mic from a retiring music techy on Gumtree – it cost me £50, and I know I’m going to use it for other things. I also brought a cheap and pretty nasty XLR to USB cable, with which I could connect the mic to my laptop. I managed to keep costs under £70, which is good for a project like this.
I recorded with Oonagh first. We had two sessions at my house. People much smarter than me have since informed me that the SM-57 is highly directional. Because of this, the singer must get quite close to the microphone. I had quite a few issues with the audio popping – something which could easily have been fixed by the implementation of a pop filter around the microphone, but at the time I did not think of such things. I removed the pops as best I could in post, using a technique I learnt from YouTube.
Oonagh did a really great job with the recording, particularly with the difficult Middle English pronunciation. After I had recorded with her, I sent some demos to Matt to help us decide on the best possible accompaniment on the hurdy gurdy. He very kindly sent me some demos of him playing alongside Oonagh in two different styles – with “buzz” and without. Essentially, the hurdy gurdy has a string on it that can be set to make a buzzing sound if wired correctly. You can hear this buzz in the background of the final recording. Matt was extremely, extremely generous with his time, especially as I was very unfamiliar with the hurdy gurdy and its inner workings.
After I had finished recording with Oonagh and Matt, I mixed several of Matt’s tracks together and put Oonagh’s vocal line over the top with a condenser added. I think I am happy with the final product, but there are several major flaws on my part that I think could have been evened out. One of them is the popping, as mentioned before, but the elephant in the room is the piece’s odd tempo. I should have set some form of set tempo for Oonagh to sing to, or recorded with Matt first, but because of my unfamiliarity with music recording did not do this. As a result, there is a slightly awkward bar in the middle that I still have nightmares about to this day. Also, there are still some pops in places which I had trouble removing. But considering that this is my first foray into production, I’m rather proud of it, even if it is pretty rough around the edges. I’m especially proud and grateful for the performances of Oonagh and Matt, both of which were excellent. Below is the final product, I hope you enjoy listening!
‘Sumer Is Icumen in” (vocals by Oonagh Mason-Butcher, instrumentation by Matthew Williams and production by Rosie Jones)’
Rosamund Jones, BA English and History