Plug in volume question

The fader is post effects bin. The gain is pre effects bin
 
Edit.
The bus can be pre or post fader, depending on what you have it set to

I thought the plug was overloading a bit so I was hoping this was the reason.  Guess it's not.

It could be, and as CJay said, the track Gain control is Pre-FX, so that's where you want to lower the input to the plug-in if it doesn't have it's own input level control.

I should clarify that Gain will not affect live input. It only affects the level of a recorded audio clip feeding the track input. But I got the impression you were talking about a part that has already been recorded, in which case, reducing the Gain should show a lower level input signal in the plug. I double-checked that this works as expected with Sonitus Compressor in X1.

Weird. Not sure what's going on. If you check the signal flow diagram on page 811 of the X1 Reference Guide PDF, you'll see that it shows the Track Gain control being the first thing in the Track section, after Clips and before live Input and the FX Bin. So it will affect the signal level from a clip to the FX Bin, but not from a live input signal as I mentioned.

I don't know of any config settings that can alter this, so if you can reproduce this in a basic project created from the Normal template, it might be time to call Tech Support. If it's only this project, something might be corrupted, or there's some project routing factor that we're missing.

You mentioned that the track output is to a Vocal bus. But the plug is directly in the Track's FX Bin, right? 

I think the Track gain is only -18 to +18 so it would not cut the entire signal.  The bus gain is -inf to +6 so there you can actually totally cut the signal. 

If you route the track to a bus and then with the (bus gain applied for pre)or send that bus to another you can see the difference in effect(post fader) on the plugin input compared to it being on the track.  I don't have an explanation for why it is set up that way(range of +-18) but I'm sure someone here can provide the rationale for it.

ok just spoke with tech support and he said that it is functioning normally.  That the gain should only reduce the signal by about half.

Well. it's true, as lorneyb2 pointed out, that track Gain can cut by only 18dB, but this should be plenty if all you want to do is take the edge off a hot input to a plugin. I thought you were saying that the input level to the FX wasn't budging at all when you lowered the track Gain. If you need to knock it down more than 18dB, you'll have to use an intermediate bus as lorneyb2 also suggested.

That the gain should only reduce the signal by about half.

Somebody in CW support told you that? I wonder what they were talking about. An 18db reduction is a lot more than half, whether you're talking power or perception.

In any case, you're better off using Alloy's input control anyway, assuming it's the first/only plugin in the fx bin. It should give you all the attenuation you could possibly need, right down to silence.