Generally, yes. Your instinct to bring all the channel faders down a bit is a pretty good starting point if you are worried about headroom. Another thing I would recommend is to not automate the faders. Insert a utility plugin for volume automation. That way the faders are strictly for balancing the mix and you won’t be fighting with your automation when you decide that a certain sound is just generally too loud.
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So say I’m highpassing it where should I cut off ideally?
Yes!!
As I said, try to adjust the volume closest to the source. If your sample is too quiet, adjust it in the sampler. Then use your channel faders to make adjustments but keep your master at unity gain (0db).
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Master was always something I was doing wrong, kept it anywhere from -3 to -8 and couldn’t figure out why the hard limited end result was too quiet lol.
That’s an example of ancient knowledge from analog days not translating into floating point digital world. Have a lot of those. 
All my tracks are automatically set to -18 except bass at -12, then use gain/trim to get it in the ballpark, then little tweaks on the track faders at the end.
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I wouldn’t go higher than 80 for the sides and 30 for the center. Keep in mind that even if the cutoff says 80, it’s doing -3dBish at that cutoff and actually starts affecting the signal around 160. Also, keep the slopes gentle, 6dB is best IMO.
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Excellent advice thanks. I use a lot of volume automation so do ending up running in circles trying to get a nice overall balance
If i have quiet samples i usually bring them up in audacity and then export them as a new wav and use that. Saves me a lot of fiddling inside the daw, especially if i use the sample in more than one tune.
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That was just an example. Whether it’s a sample, synth, mic or whatever.
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A lower shelf will use EQ cycles to phase in a way where it lowers the volume in the lower part of the signal at roughly the freq point where you tells it to
but a highpass does more than that i think, because it introduces a negative space, so it doesnt only slightly phase a signal out of time but maybe skips or moves the whole signal forwards and out of phase -because it has to cut a bit off
i think its like that
so keep it in mind with sounds with transients
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what you want to do it just like optical said- go in on the audio and draw
pos or neg volume envelopes on that sun of a bee instead
maybe a dip somewhere if you are feeling naughty
you’re fine with Reaper™ because the track fader can be adjusted independent of the volume automation
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Just dont forget to turn down your channel fader if you decide to delete the volume automation. Done that many times and almost deafened myself
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What are you using to monitor? Just curious
My master chain usually has a utility set to 100%. Is that cancelling out the mono sub and kick?
Assuming you mean the width control is set to 100%, and all the other controls are default, then this is doing nothing to your signal at all. Which is probably good, I wouldn’t use the utility width control on your whole master anyways. It won’t introduce any stereo information that isn’t already there, so no it won’t make your sub and kick not mono. But it also won’t do anything, and if you turn it down you’re just reducing the stereo image of your whole track.
That said if you were using the utility on the master channel for something else specific (maybe a volume fade at the end or subtle automation?) then that would totally be a reason to use it