How do you inspire yourself? Where you get ideas?

Well.

This goes straight forward: Where do you get your inspiration? How do you develope your ideas?

Is it art, nature, other music?

Do you have a concept for your songs before you start out and work towards it or do you lean back and wait where the muse lead you?

When using music for inspiration: How far does this go for you? Would you copy a short lick or melody to incorporate it to your song intentionally? Have you ever heard a song and thought "Fuck. My song sounds exactly like that lead melody"? Or are you just catching the mood or the feel of a song that drives you to make something similar feeling?

Tell me about your experience in "collecting" inspiration.

I get my inspiration from feelings of sound?(the feelings sound produce).
This I can get in many forms like listening to music I like or just listening to the sound the piano produces or the guitar.

When I write music at its best I'm mostly in my songwriting mood where I'm really into something and I don't care about nothing else almost like being free from current?(spelling?) burdens.

When I started writing songs I did not have a concept. In the beginning I only used 3 chords Am,G & C and wrote a song upon those chords and the melodi was inside each chord as it was played (if that makes sense)?.

When listening to other music (only before I write music) I never listen when I write becuase I want my music to be truly Original in melodi and Feel.

The third song I ever wrote actually made me question if it had been played in a movie before and IF I was just remembering the melodi but not actually that it already existed or not.

It varies. Sometimes I get inspired when I'm listening to something else. Other times I think "I want to make music that sounds like ______." Other times I take the "lean back" method and just dick around with presets until I get a skeleton of something I might want to work with.

I definitely get my best ideas in the shower. Often times an entire song will just appear in my head there. Unfortunately I don't have the ability to actually compose it all at once, so I lose a lot of it by the time I actually get to a computer (And just through the interference of finding the right notes). However, I've started recording whatever I can hum, so I can at least come back to that later.

It has occurred to me a couple times, that the thing I was working on sounds a lot like something else that's already been made. But usually at that point, I figure I might as well finish it.

Most of the time my music comes from joke ideas, a serious melody I had in mind, or from nature.

Like for instance, it'll be winter time, and ill think, wouldnt that be funny if someone made a summer anthem in the middle of december.

Or wouldnt it be great if someone made a progressive house tune at 124 bpm instead of 128.

Doing it this way feels less forced to me when im out of ideas.

Most of the time, I get a lot of inspiration from movies. I try and draw a lot of emotion in my music, and whatever movie I watch, the song usually has a similar theme.

I also often get inspired for drops by listening to birds chirping.

The inspiration's the easy part. Anything can provide inspiration, really. I decide I want to make music like such-and-such a composer, or to make something that fuses [style X] with [style Y], or to make a piece that revolves around the notes B, C, and E#, or whatever. Or, better still, I just improvise at the piano (sometimes it helps to turn on a sound recorder, turn off your brain, and just doodle for 10 minutes) until I find something I sort of like. I actually wrote a melody-writing guide on the old BIAB forums which could stand to be updated and fixed, but basically it's a foolproof way to come up with a melody that sounds okayish.

Yeah, starting a piece is easy. The hard part is going somewhere with it once you've started. I've got a rant about how to finish a piece of music and not get stuck, but I'm tired right now, and tend to ramble (more than usual) when I'm tired. Basically, it boils down to developing the material you've already got (in more ways than just screwing with layering and texture), and opening up your expectations.

[LATE REPLY ALERT]
I usually open my DAW, and either mess around with some synthesizers to create a cool sound I can use as a base, or just play with my midi keyboard to create a nice melody, and base a track on that.

I usually start with some drums, then I put in a melody to fit it and think about what genre I want to do, then I make a synth and if I can't fit one to the melody I start over with the melody until it gets good, then I just go with the flow and see where I get to. the melody is usually A A# F F# or G for me.

Other than that I don't get much inspiration, I'm quite creative so I am my own inspiration, if that makes any sense.

Inspiration can come from everywhere, but most of the time it's just me messing around with the keyboard and a piano sound or synth.
FL Studio has this feature where you can randomly create melodies. I used it twice, but you need to tweak it a lot (timing, etc). Its basically the computer doing the "messing around on the keyboard"-part for you and you just need to filtrate the good stuff out.

I work a lot with samples. Sometimes there is a particular "color" to a song (or sound) and I try to catch that by sampling a tiny bit of it and edit till it is (almost) unrecognizable.
Or I sample my own stuff, like old piano melodies (created by messing around) I rendered but used nowhere.

Chopped, Pitched, Distorted, Crushed - It's fun to take a (finished) sound and alter it endlessly.

Most of the time I just create pads out of samples without a project in mind. Piano chords, a guitar recording, vocals - everything is good for a start. There is often no clear melody or chord progression, but you can use it to orientate while writing melodies or bass lines above it...

When writing melodies I sometimes get the feeling of copying someone, but that might also be a sign of having developed an ear for the patterns I myself like to listen to.
There is a very good Hans Zimmer quote (wish I could find that video interview again) on this whole "am I copying someone ?"-fear which goes something along the lines of: "Time used thinking about whether a melody is stolen or not is time you could have used to write a whole song" and "It's not your job to check if you copied a melody, it's your job to write them".

It happens rarely, but sometimes I do have a clear idea of what a finished project has to sound like before I go to work on it - I can count those on the fingers of one hand though...

I'm pretty inspired by the scene that I'm in. In the dubstep scene there's constantly people coming up with new crazy sounds and just that in itself is enough to inspire/motivate me to try and one up them. I think it's important to surround yourself with positive people and good art. You can learn to be more creative, you just have to surround yourself with creativity. Another thing I'd recommend to those who are a little bit more open minded is the use of psychedelics (Mushrooms or LSD is my preference). Obviously that's not needed to become a successful musician, but it has quite the positive effect on art (in my opinion).

One of the best things I've found is just to try different things every time, as much as I firmly believe that styles develop through repetition (Ever find yourself writing the same lines? Perhaps remaking the same preset over and over again) after a while it can totally kill your creativity.

I used to use Sylenth for everything but I ended up deleting it from my computer just to force me into doing something different, and it really worked! It could be anything...Maybe even just a workflow change. And then the ideas just come to you as your working, I usually don't have an idea in my head when I'm about to sit down making music. Chances are the ideas that get put down are subconsciously inspired by stuff I've been listening too throughout the week but how the hell are you going to find your own sound if your deliberately searching for it? Best to let inspiration naturally come to you without forcing it...

I may or may not be high while writing this...

well first thing is to make sure to know your daw well . in my case that's cubase.

what i do for inspiration hmm it depends if it is an instrumental work or a work with vocals.

except of the funstuff i do sometimes where i just got an idea and want to bring it to the tune

i try to imagine a storyline of more then one work which tells it . it depends of the kind of story it is and i try to seek places where the atmosphere fits to that story i want to tell so i can get into the mood of the story.
When you have the mood it's alot easier to use it and transform it to the sounding which express exactly that feeling.

don't know if it is clear so far what i mean if not feel free to ask.