Professional studio sounds a scary name when you are on your journey to launching your own music composition without getting connected to one! Here is what they do when it comes to Vocal editing, which is an essential part of the music arrangement and the song composition.
Firstly, you must understand that there will be inconsistent levels of singing, time issues, and intonation problems, which are the most common issues in vocal editing before the vocals reach a professional studio. These studios then process the vocals for correcting the timing issues, if any, and then start off with the pitch correction and scale alterations, as per the requirements. Many DAWs offer a toolset to do this. Among many steps, few include inspection of the beginning and endings of the recorded parts. As a small tip, you can do so by just comparing the recorded vocals with the original song.
Each part may have other issues like unwanted noise, for example, background noise of people talking, or breathing whispers, etc. which can be both before or after the vocals, or in between, at times. Professional music studios often cut these away in the beginning of the process itself as it helps in keeping the mix cleaner for later. This is done very wisely keeping in mind the parts you might wish to add later. For very different vocals including chorus, etc., keep these files separate as needed for later because the edits will be done on these separately. By the end of this process, the professional studio has several snippets or small files of voice. Finally, each section is processed for the errors and corrections. Now, they detect for possible issues and fix them separately including time correction, pitch variation, scale up down, etc.
The result will be a pitch amended recording with a proper timing and now it is finally the time to mix the corrected files, wherein the mixing and mastering engineer comes into picture. These professionals merge the snippets making it look like one file and correct the entire stem file to finally produce a perfect vocal editing output.
Having said that, the process is not as easy as it looks. For a novice, it might even require several hours to days to process just a single vocal edit, yet, it would be nowhere close to the professional studio quality. Considering that you want faster results, you may opt for professional vocal editing studios, like Carry A Tune studio and spend your major time singing the song rather than just processing the vocals. Let us know what else you think goes in a professional studio in the comment sections.