Electric Guitar Volume

It depends on what your trying to express musically if your playing death metal by all means turn the guitar all the way and crank the amp till the speakers rattle.Music is an expression of your emotions sometimes they are quiet and subdued other times they are uplifting and happy to be a good musician you have to control the volume not only with the volume knobs but with your pick this is why in sheet music they have crescendos and decrescendos and words in Italian like forte(loud) mezzo forte(medium) and pianimisio(quiet) and the same reason they have three pedals on a piano one to dampen one to sustain and one to sustain briefly.A good rule is if your singing don't drown out your vocal because your selling the lyrics and your voice not how loud your guitar can be if your playing with other musicians blend in once you master control over the volume you are playing at you will find much more enjoyment in music.

Many players crank their volume all the time and get a gain or volume boost using effects pedals.  I don't do that. 

I have my gain set really high on my pedals all the time and roll my guitar volume off to chill the sound out.  I do this either by turning guitar volume way down or by tapping my pickups. 

Then when it's solo time I turn up and let er rip.

I have a Fender DeVille 410 which is LOUD. But I use this little bugger in the effects loop, drive the preamp tubes up at 7-9, and then pull the output volume back down. That way you get nice hot tube sound without all the irritating hearing loss.

http://www.amazon.com/Carls-Custom-Guit … soak+pedal

Totally worth $40.

Or you could buy a Bugera 5 watt amp with the built in attenuator. .1 .3 and 5 watts.  At .1 I can roast the tubes at a pratice vol level. (I also run a MXR Full Bore into it to drive the tubes a bit more,or for a clean boost, I have an old Yamaha Compressor /Sustainer, I turn up the sustain and attack and pull down the output a bit, it really gives the clean a punch)

There is something to be said for volume, though.   Guitars start to do odd and marvelous things when cranked up to 11.

But as TF noted,, when Im in the house alone,, all hades can break loose!

I'm in a fair sized house a decent distance from any neighbors and there's nobody home except my nephew (who also like to play) and for some reason I have yet to push to amp more than halfway with the guitar volume set at 3 or 4. There must be something wrong with me.

Completely disagree. Need to run tubes hard to make them sound good.

For 20 years in bars I ran my Fender Twin Reverb amp at 4 (out of 10) if I dared. It had to run that loud to sound it's best.
On my 1961 Gibson 330 with P-90 single wound pickups, I set my tone on 6 out of 10 and my Guitar volume at 8 1/2 to 9 so I could play rhythm at a balanced volume with the band. All I had to do was crank the volume up to 10 with my right pinky to play a lead solo.