How can you play 5-strings bass songs on a 4-strings bass?

[Shroud]

There's a bunch of CDLCs for 5-strings bass such as Toto's "Pamela" and Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire". I am not even sure if RS currently supports 5-strings bass, and because I only own 4-strings, I can't really verify it. Anyway, I think these CDLCs normally have custom tuning on bass, with all strings tuned down as if they were the first 4 strings of a 5-string?

So how do you normally play those CDLCs with a 4-string? Do you really tune it down that much? Doesn't it make the strings wobble a lot under such low tension? Is it just better to give up and buy a 5-string?

Originally I though people used the pitch shifter in CFSM, but then I found out that it doesn't work on bass, or more precisely it does work but it always applies to the bass whatever shift should be applied to the lead guitar path, so unless the guitar part is for a 7-string then it would never shift the bass correctly.

[coldrampage]

6 hours ago, Shroud said:

There's a bunch of CDLCs for 5-strings bass such as Toto's "Pamela" and Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire". I am not even sure if RS currently supports 5-strings bass, and because I only own 4-strings, I can't really verify it. Anyway, I think these CDLCs normally have custom tuning on bass, with all strings tuned down as if they were the first 4 strings of a 5-string?

There's pretty much 2 ways to do 5 string bass in rocksmith. You can either cut off the G string and have it as BEAD on a standard bass track or you can put the bass on a guitar track as BEADG(C) for proper 5/6 string bass. You can see this with the Billy Joel one since they offer both options.

6 hours ago, Shroud said:

Originally I though people used the pitch shifter in CFSM, but then I found out that it doesn't work on bass, or more precisely it does work but it always applies to the bass whatever shift should be applied to the lead guitar path, so unless the guitar part is for a 7-string then it would never shift the bass correctly.

The cfsm pitch shifter probably wouldn't be able to work on 5 string bass parts properly (assuming if it did work on bass only songs) because of the low bass tuning fix setting the frequency to A220 and setting the offsets an octave higher.

The best workaround would probably be to use the "force E standard tuning" option and then either save a -5 pitch shift tone to the tone stick in tone designer or modify the songs tone and add one yourself.

6 hours ago, Shroud said:

So how do you normally play those CDLCs with a 4-string? Do you really tune it down that much? Doesn't it make the strings wobble a lot under such low tension? Is it just better to give up and buy a 5-string?

I gave up and got a cheapo 5 string but you could also get an external pitch shifter pedal to use with rocksmith which may be a more useful investment depending on what you want to do with it.