Great thread, much better than the “No OB sucks” threads!
Learn how to get the best out of what you have!
I don’t have a Digitakt yet, but I have a lot of outboard gear & don’t master my tracks, so I have a little to say about getting your music to sound as good as possible without mastering at all.
I eq with my mixer when sampling. So I try to get this right when sampling, not after (weather it’s vinyl, guitar, hardware synths, found sounds, vocals, whatever).
I reduce lows in the “high” sounds & reduce highs in the “low” sounds (listen. use your ears).
Make your beat in the Digitakt & get your levels right.
Record the master outs while jamming.
Then use your favorite Izotope plugin for mastering
(I hear Izotope has great mastering plugins, like Izotope Ozone suggested above).
You could even dump certain sounds or certain tracks into your DAW, do what you need to do, then dump sounds back into Digitakt (1 shots &/or loops of your tracks).
In my opinion getting your levels right alone makes such a difference…so does panning sounds, layering sounds & cleaning up frequencies (easy to make things muddy, at least for me, I love deep & dark sounds with bass that goes boom).
These things are HUGE in my opinion -
Volume/levels
Panning
Layering
Frequencies