<<<<2) If I wanted to copy a specific sound from one recording and add it to
another - how could I blend it effectively?>>
<<It very much depends on the nature of the source, but in general you'll want
to have long crossfades to feather the transitional seams over time. Depending
on how similar or different the sources are this could be between a few
milliseconds (say for well matched rain ambience,) to several minutes in the
case of massively divergent soundscapes.>>
I see from other responses that I misperceived the question as one regarding
moving from one ambience to another, rather than adding an overlay to an
ongoing ambience. In that case I think you have two possible scenarios. First
you might have a sound that is sharply articulated from its background
surroundings, say, a singular crow caw against a relatively quiet forest
backdrop. This can be cut tightly to the beginning & end points of the caw &
simply dropped into an adjacent track in a multitrack DAW. If the desired sound
has a high level of continuous background, a distant bird within a cacophony of
cicadas for example, you'll need a lot of ambience, possibly minutes worth, in
front of & after the main focal point, & do very long fades in & out, on an
adjacent track. Otherwise the shift in ambience will be jarring & call undue
attention to the manipulation of the soundscape. Some overlays work great,
others just can't be made to sound believable, so it's going to be successful
on a case by case basis.
Scott Fraser
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