I've always been cautious about my track input levels being too hot and one of the things that I've done to guard against this is to automatically pull the faders down for ALL of my instrument tracks in Logic from "0.0" to "-0.6".
I can't say that I have any basis for doing this other than it seems to give me a good balance of being able to push my outboard preamps to get a good sound and avoid clipping the inputs.

As of lately, I'm starting to wonder about this logic (no pun intended). With all of these points being contributing parts of the overall gain staging process, can someone speak to a 'best practice' for setting individual track levels in a DAW to provide the optimum balance for quality of sound and reasonable headroom?

For the most part, I rarely track with any EQ, comp, or limiting, save using my LA-610, but even then it's minimal. My preference is to record as 'organically' as possible (no, I'm not a hippie) and to allow some room for compression, etc. later in the mixing stage.

I've really searched for guidance on this and just haven't been able to get a solid answer. It seems that a lot of tutorials that I see tend to revolve around software instruments of which I don't use other than the occasional keyboard plugin . That said, all of my recordings are for acoustic/electric guitar, vox, bass and drums.

Thanks.