Simple Mastering Techniques???

LANDR is pretty useless and can't do anything that you can't do in Sonar. 
 
Some things to get you started. Think of mixing and mastering as being like a paint job on a good guitar. The mix is the wood stain - that lovely sun burst. It looks great and you could just leave it at that. Mastering is the clear coat and the final buffing to make it shine. It's important to remember that if you don't get that sun burst just right with the colours blended just as you want them, then no application of clear coat or buffing will fix it.
 
Think of mixing and mastering as being like a paint job on a good guitar. The mix is the wood stain - that lovely sun burst. It looks great and you could just leave it at that. Mastering is the clear coat and the final buffing to make it shine. It's important to remember that if you don't get that sun burst just right with the colours blended just as you want them, then no application of clear coat or buffing will fix it. You can't polish a turd, so mixing should be a pretty long and laborious process to get the mix just right before you even think of mastering.
 
Mastering should generally involve doing as little as possible and unlike mixing where you may make huge adjustments in EQ and compression, to get that final gloss in the master should involve small, incremental changes. A big mistake a lot of people make is to use all their mastering plugins in the chain just because they have them. If you added compression on your mix, you may not need any more on the master. You only need a multi-band compressor if you have an issue that needs it etc.
 
When you export your mix leave plenty of headroom -6db is good. The first step in your mastering is to add a good limiter to set the level and loudness - don't just crank it up to get it sounding as loud as possible! Use a loudness meter - Youlean Loudness Meter is free! You want the true peak at about -0.1 to -0.2db with between -11 and -12LUFS (integrated) but this all varies according to what media format your music will be played on. So spend a bit of time researching that. You can use Sonar's Adaptive Limiter. My favourite limiter is DMG's Limitless. Your master will now sound louder and fuller. Note although I mention the limiter first because it's so important and usually the first thing you add, it should be the last thing (other than meters/analysers) in your master chain. Everything else should be before it.
 
Next, try a good mix/mastering compressor just to see if it adds a bit of lift/glue - you don't want to hear compression. You're really looking for tone and clarity at this point. Bypass the compressor for before and after comparison. If it doesn't improve anything once setup, don't use it!
 
If something doesn't quite sit right or it sounds a bit muddy on the low end etc, add a multi band compressor using just one band set to the frequency range where the problem is. If that kick drum is a bit too prominent for example, you can fix it with this tool. Sonar's LP MB can be used for this.
 
EQ can now be added to adjust the overall sound, add a bit of sparkle and thump and balance things out. My favourite type of EQs for this are analogue style passive EQs. These can really make the sound come alive and add warmth and brilliance, but don't go over the top.
 
After this there are lots of other things you could do. The most important of which is to check the stereo field. You can also widen the stereo field, add exciters and much more.
 
There are no rules really. This is just a guide, but one rule that you should definitely try when mixing or mastering is the rule of thirds. That is, if you make an adjustment anywhere, back it off one-third. This is because we often over compensate with our ears and that can introduce other problems. If you find you are having to do too much in the mastering phase, you should probably scrap it and go back and mix it again!
 
Lastly, read up on dithering as this is also very important to understand when it comes to mastering as you will inevitably be exporting to a lower bitrate which will introduce quantization errors. Also read up on loudness standards and how that can affect your level on different media such as CD, MP3, ITunes, Spotify, Youtube etc. Over loud masters can now be a disadvantage on the last three platforms and into the future.
 
I hope this helps. With just a few steps you can really make your music come alive and sound so much more professional which to most people's ears also makes it sound better. Before you mix or master a track always calibrate your ears by listening to one or more commercial tracks of a similar genre and use that as a reference for your sound.

johndavidross
Thank you everyone.
 
My main problem is going to be deciphering what you are all saying. I don't know what a limiter is or does as well as a multi-band limiter and even compression.
 
It sounds like I need to export my mix first and then import that into a mastering template???? I don't master within my project?
 
I need to start with the basics here as I'm very new to this.

There's just no getting away from having to spend a certain amount of time on the learning curve, but Loudmax  
 
 http://www.vst4free.com/free_vst.php?id=2060
 
is a free and very simple limiter with only two controls that you might find easier to start with. I have al kinds of bells and whistles these days, but still use this one quite often.