I've had Rocksmith for a while but I just recently started trying out CLDCs, but I seem to be missing something..

I'm not sure if this is intentional, but whenever I start a CDLC song for the first time, it is already at "max difficulty", meaning all the notes show up. I've double checked and this happens even on songs that have Dynamic Dificulty. Is there something i'm doing wrong ?

You can lower it by going into Riff Repeater, select the whole song, and reduce difficulty to 0.