It seems like when I'm in game the notes cant be held as long as I can outside of the game.  Does rocksmith kinda kill the sustain or is it just because I have a cheap guitar or am I making tones without something that could make them last longer?  Anybody else feel like this happens or is it just me?

Depends what you mean. I suspect that Rocksmith is using some kind of noise gate, which might have something to do with it.

Depends on the tone, some might kill the sustain, some other help make it longer.

Yeah it happens but i just plug in my guitar to my mixer, raise the levels, then plug the mixer into an amp where the rocksmith cable to the input of an amp

Compression/limiter pedal (in game) can give some sustain back, I also have noticed the lack of proper sustain especially when playing with single coil pickups... Most probably the cable is to blame.

 

I need to test via the amp, but I'm afraid I will have to buy Eleven Rack or similar and can't get back to simple setup...

 

Ofc bad tone effects can also kill the sustain, many times I notice myself changing manually to back to basic tones, loud dist and loud clean tones are usually only needed anyway  :-P

 

I wish the game had real time instrument volume level tied to some key pair, master volume is handled with gaming keyboard...

There is one song I was recently playing at 80% speed.  My sustain lasted for 8 to 10 beats with the tone that was set for that song (don't remember which one).  I set my guitar volume high and the song low in the mixer.  My guitar was still sustaining when the note suddenly stops as if I damped the string.  This is a gate effect.  A gate is generally used to quite a noizy guitar or prevent cross talk between microphone (e.g.  a drum set rig).  I suspect the person who generated the tone had a grounding problem with his guitar and set the gate a bit high.

If you need to put a gate on a tone, you have a problem in your audio system that you need to correct like 99% of the time.

If you need to put a gate on a tone, you have a problem in your audio system that you need to correct like 99% of the time.

I agree 100% with you.  Next time run across the song I try an remember its name and post it here.