Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but there’s absolutely no truth to those mixing levels advice. For starters, MIDI volume has zero relation to digital zero at the D/A converters. On the whole you can set everything to 127 and you won’t hear any difference to if you set it to 64 and just turned up the master.

In fact, there’s resolution to be lost by turning down your parts. Hit the D/A too low, and your 16 bit converters are now down to 8 bit!

Be careful where you get advice from... on the whole, you’ll find your arranger’s design team have already figured out the optimum gain staging for you with the factory ROM styles and presets.

Thing is, if you are struggling to hear your lead or swamping your backing using factory presets, a lot of the time the culprit can be tracked down to how hard you are playing, in the case of velocity sensitive sounds, or not using an expression pedal in the case of no velocity sounds (usually organ sounds).

Being the bastard stepchild of home organs, a lot of arranger players came from organ or accordion backgrounds and tend to play very lightly, whereas a lot of piano players tend to not use an expression pedal much. Both can mess with the factory balance...