ProtonVPN free tier has US and Netherlands regions you can use for RS+

If you don’t have a VPN and don’t want to pay for one just to play songs on RS+, you can use the Proton VPN free tier which gives you access to servers on US, Netherlands and Japan.
Japan is currently useless for rocksmith as the game didn’t launch there but for instance I’m able to play the missing song sfrom MUSE, Linking Park, The cure, etc. from Europe by connecting to the US servers.
I assume for those in US you could connect to NL and play the Metallica tracks when they launch, or any other that is available in Europe but not US.

Only thing is you have to enter settings → advanced and activate split tunneling (Only included apps will go through VPN channel). Then, add to it the game executables as well as ubi connect. The button to add apps to split tunneling is at the bottom of the window, make sure to scroll down to see it as I didn’t find it at first.
I’m not 100% sure this is mandatory, but for me the game failed to launch last time I tried if it wasn’t activated.

This is just for those in the same situation as me, I’m not trying to convince anyone to sub or anything… please save those comments for yourself. Hopefully it helps someone.

I had trouble choosing which server to connect to. I will load it up again this morning to see it I can get it to connect to the NL server. Thanks for posting this!

Edit: I installed Proton again. It turns out that the latest free version doesn’t let you just choose whatever country you want. They have updated it to be more user friendly or something. There is something of a workaround. When you press the Quick Connect button it will connect you to the closest country with available bandwidth. Once it is connected, you can press a Change Country (or Change Server maybe) and it should connect to a server in a different one of five countries. In my case it first connects to Japan. In two tries changing server it connected to Romania first, Netherlands second. So, a few extra clicks, but totally useable!

There were some moments where the song slowed down and became robotic and distorted which usually indicates network issues. Simply stopping the VPN seems to solve that though.

An alternate option for the more technically adventurous. An AWS hosted instance of OpenVPN. 1 year free using this method as long as you don’t go over the data transfer limits - but since you can turn off the vpn after getting to the R+ menus, that is easy to manage.

France and Brasil are good VPN end points for R+ use.

Australia is the choice if you’re a Steve Vai fan.

Strange, I can select any server I want from the free ones on the 3 countries in the main view. Instead of using the quick connect button you press the down arrow on the country you want and it’ll show the list of servers you can connect to, showing also the load they have.
Also I don’t have Romania, I wonder if this is different depending on where you live?

You can switch off the VPN after you’ve logged into UbiConnect and opened R+ as far as the menus.

I think in current versions that is no longer supported. They also increased the free countries from 3 to 5. Adding Romania and Poland, I think. Split tunneling is disabled in free now as well. I saw a Reddit thread from a few months ago describing the change. I think the proton website also talks about it.

Don’t update your client!