Take a very short survey, and you’ll be entered to win some six months of intensive training in music production and Ableton Live, or copies of some of our favorite recent software, a two-app box set of Reason and Record from Propellerhead or Roger Linn’s AdrenaLinn Sync.

Knowing more about our readers helps us develop Create Digital Music, Create Digital Motion, and the Noisepages community as free resources, both by letting us know about you and helping us to work with the sponsors who pay our bills. It’s also a chance for you to tell us where you’d most like to see us invest.

I think privacy is important. Questions are kept strictly anonymous; we don’t associate your IP address, location, or email address with your answers. You’ll answer a minute or two of quick questions, then be provided with a separate form for your email (because otherwise we can’t contact you if you win); winners will be randomly selected.

I’m also pleased to get the chance to help our friends at DubSpot celebrate the launch of their online school on Monday. The Live training includes 66 hours of hands-on instruction and labs and three levels of Ableton Live education over half a year.

Reason and Record Duo from Propellerhead gives you the latest version of both these music-making tools for Mac and Windows – a virtual rack of gear, plus recording, mixing, and production.

AdrenaLinn Sync 2 provides beat-synced modulation and effects and now runs on Windows (VST/RTAS) or Mac (VST/AU/RTAS).

The survey will close 11:59 PM NYC (US Eastern) time, Thursday, February 3. You must enter before that time in order to qualify.

Enter the survey to win!

http://cdm.2011.sgizmo.com/s3/

And thanks, as always, for your support for this independent site and community. More on the prizes below (with some rather interesting videos, all).

Ableton Live Training Online from DubSpot

DubSpot offers training from its expert staff, like the free tutorial featured above.

Ableton Live Core Program ($2,495)
6-months / Three levels / 24 sessions / 66 hours of hands-on instruction + labs

The Core Program introduces you to the fundamentals of producing music with Ableton Live, creating a number of sketches while developing your own unique sound, then developing your ideas into two fully fleshed out songs.

Courses:
Ableton Live Level 1: Shake Hands with Live
Ableton Live Level 2: Completing Your First Track
Ableton Live Level 3: Production Essentials

http://www.dubspot.com/ableton-live/

AdrenaLinn Sync

AdrenaLinn Sync is a software plug-in from Roger Linn Design that provides the same unique beat-synced filter modulation and sequencing effects of our AdrenaLinn III guitar pedal, plus quite a bit more. Though intended for guitar, it adds fascinating rhythmic tonal effects to any instrument or processed audio.

AdrenaLinn Sync transforms your input signal–guitar, keyboard, turntable, loops, etc.–into dramatic rhythmic patterns of filtered, resonated, chopped, pulsed, spiked, sequenced, looped, delayed and otherwise manipulated tones.

AdrenaLinn Sync

Reason and Record Duo

Record – super intuitive, streamlined recording software. Reason – the legendary virtual studio rack packed with synths, samplers, effects and all the electronic music production tools you need.

Combine the two and they fuse into one incredibly powerful application, while still remaining the fast, lean, rock solid music production environment that lets you stay focused on your music making.

Reason

Record

Enter the survey to win!

http://cdm.2011.sgizmo.com/s3/

Americans are busy getting ready for Thanksgiving and … everyone is busy, anyway. But there’s still time to:

1. Tell us what makes you musically thankful – we’ll feature your responses on CDM.

2. Tell us if you’d like to get handcrafted, human-written exclusive notes in your inbox occasionally from CDM (totally optional).

3. Get a chance to win the deluxe edition of T-rackS 3, the tasty mixing and mastering suite, with lots of new routing, models, and metering.

I’m actually working on a way to visualize all of these “reasons we’re thankful” in Processing, so I’d love lots of responses! Keep them coming!

You have until the end of the day Friday, November 28 NYC time.

Answer below (takes about a minute), or head to:

http://cdm.thanksgiving.sgizmo.com/

Thanksgiving is an American holiday on this international site, but the basic ideal for which the day has come to stand – giving thanks – is a noble one. So we want to do three things here for CDM:

1. Ask you what for you’re thankful, musically speaking. It might be a synth, or a collaborator, or an album, or a song, or the metronome you’ve used since you started playing, or having more discipline practicing. It could be tech (you know the slant of this site), or not. I’ll be putting together the answers in a big, warm heap for us to share, like virtual pumpkin pie.

2. Meet CDM Notes. Like you need another mailing list, I know. This one will be different – it won’t just be an automated dump of headlines; it’ll actually be an email from me with personal notes on the week’s events in music and motion, and some exclusive tidbits not elsewhere. You don’t have to sign up for the mailing list, but this is a chance to do it if you like. And it’ll include some things to be thankful for.

3. You could win a copy of T-RackS 3 Deluxe. Whether you opt for the mailing list or not, you’ll be entered to win a copy of IK Multimedia’s latest release of their mixing and mastering suite. (I’m playing with it now; watch for a review soon.)

Enter now: http://cdm.thanksgiving.sgizmo.com/

T-RackS 3 has a bunch of new stuff in it, too, so I expect we’ll make someone very happy. It’s basically a bundle of emulations of tube and digital models for mastering, with new mixing, metering, and models. (Mmmmm, alliteration.) The latest release adds new vintage and analog emulations and modeling tech, additional chaining options, extensive new metering, new oversampling, and both standalone and plug-in versions in all the formats. We’re giving you the Deluxe copy, so you get an extensive collection of tools. And if you lose, as I said, stay tuned for our full review once I’ve had sufficient time with it. (I’m calling in a couple of my mastering friends, since they have better ears than I do.)

Unlucky in these things? IK reminds us that they’re doing the one million installation giveaway; you can win up to $17,000 in toys and everyone gets to choose from one piece of free software.

1 Million Installation Celebration / giveaway / contest

… but of course, we hope you enter ours, too!

But on to being thankful – we look forward to hearing from you.

Fill out the embedded survey, or head directly to:

http://cdm.thanksgiving.sgizmo.com/

PreSonus FaderPort: Vincent Hill, Seattle, WA
Numark Total Control: Nicolas Paciorek, Watertown, NY
Native Instruments Elektrik Piano: Valerie Mabre, Marion, OH
Native Instruments Absynth 4: John Belt, Canton, OH
Moog Music Moogerfooger FreqBox: John J. Koziol, Boston, MA
Glyph GT 050Q 250GB Hard Drive: Ken Hartz, Strongsville, OH
Alesis ControlPad: Joel A. St. Julien, San Francisco, CA
Ableton Live 6: Chris Budge, Newbury Park, CA
Akai MPC500: William Max Thomason, Denver, CO

Each winner will also get AudioMIDI’s Synth Legends DVD.

For details on these items, see the complete list of giveaway items.

These are the names on the forms, incidentally; I take no credit for typos. We’re confirming with these winners; if any is unconfirmed, we will re-award the prizes.

We got an extraordinary number of entrants: nearly 3,000 qualified entries, and 4,000 entries from around the world. And, the banner prizes aside, we got an amazing selection of websites from readers in the US and around the world. We’ll be sending Ableton beanies around the globe to some of our favorite selections. The variety and quality of websites is truly overwhelming, so I expect to be digging through these over the coming weeks, highlighting some favorites as we go. I really am going through them all; that’s what’s taking so long!

We also got a real look at who you are and what interests you, including some of our sizable international readership; I hope to share some of that with everyone soon.

Thanks to our sponsors: I really want to thank, in reverse alphabetical order, PreSonus, Moog Music, Ableton, Native Instruments, Glyph, Alesis, Numark, AudioMIDI.com, and Akai Professional for making this giveaway possible and for their support of the site. We reached out to sponsors who matter a lot to us, and it’s terrific to have their support of the site.

UPDATED: That’s it, folks; this giveaway is done. We’ll have winners, some overall stats on who our readers are, and some of our favorite websites from around the world soon! For starters:

Here are the winners

If you’ve been waiting to enter the CDM Giveaway, this is your last chance: entries are closed as of midnight tonight (Monday), 9pm on the West Coast of North America, early morning Tuesday in the UK and Europe, and during the day in Asia, the Pacific, and Australia.

Speaking of other parts of the world, we really will be going through some of our favorite websites entered from around the world, giving away DVDs and beanies to our international readers and featuring you on the main site. We’ve gotten so many entries that I’ll be digging through those in the weeks after the competition, but stay tuned. For our US readers in the main giveaway, we’ll count up the results, fire up our random number generator, and announce winners by the end of the week.

You can’t enter more than once, but if you haven’t entered, go do it now:

Enter the CDM Giveaway

I’m pleased to announce the first-ever CDM Giveaway. We’ve got over US$4,000 of hardware and software tools for music creation, and we’d like to give you the chance to win them. To do that, we’re holding a good, old-fashioned prize drawing — I’ve been warming up my true random number generator — so that all you have to do is enter for a chance to win. To better your odds, each prize will get a different winner.

CDM Giveaway Info Page; official rules (no purchase necessary).

Here’s what we’ve got:

Akai MPC500 mobile music workstation
Ableton Live 6 music production software
Alesis ControlPad drum pad controller
Glyph GT 050Q 250GB eSATA/USB/FW400/FW800 hard drive
Moog Music Moogerfooger FreqBox VCO effects box
Native Instruments Absynth 4 soft synth
Native Instruments Elektrik Piano soft synth
Numark Total Control DJ control surface
PreSonus FaderPort

…plus boxes of Ableton beanies and AudioMIDI.com Synth Legends DVDs. You can check everything out on the giveaway page.

And get some link love, too: Eligible residents of the United States can enter to win any one of these prizes. Unfortunately, for legal reasons we can’t extend the whole sweepstakes to international readers. To make up for it, we’ll be watching international entries for the best blogs, project pages, and music websites to feature on CDM, and we’ll send out Ableton beanies and/or DVDs to our favorite entries. (American readers, we’ll be watching your pages, too, so be sure to include your URLs when you enter.)

We’ve been putting this together for a while now and it’s been a lot of work, so I’m excited to be able to roll it out. We’ve hand-picked some of our favorite gear and software makers to partner with, or we wouldn’t be doing this.

Full details on the giveaway page. Enter now, because at the stroke of midnight following Monday, June 11, the contest is over. And I really want to get these boxes of gear and swag shipped. It’ll be a lot more fun out of the brown cardboard boxes, I’m sure.

Update: If you’re not from the US – please do fill out the form, if you include nothing other than your URL (so we can check out your site) and your country. (Nothing else is required.)

We’re really sorry we weren’t able to go global on this one for legal reasons (I try to explain why in comments). But that’s all the more reason to find out where you’re from. Server stats provide a very incomplete picture of what country people are from, and we would like to know. And if you include contact info, I might at least be able to get some of you some swag.