Yeah, I like the ideas of crytek. Best inspiration is always something that goes on around you. I get best inspiration from moments around me. For example:
Few months ago, I went camping with friends. We were staying in some small swamp cabin for some time, and then decided to trip around. Later in the evening we were looking for a place to stay, and couldn’t really come up with anything, in the late evening we found a nice place near some lake, but it was really dark outside and we were all tired. We tried to start a fire but then it started raining, and it was really hard to find any firewood in the dark. So we just went into the tents and tried to get some sleep.
The night was pretty restless, heavy rain was dripping on the tent and strange forest sounds were surrounding us. It felt a bit scary, as we really had no idea where we were, and what was going around us, as we really didn’t have any time to look around. But in a strange way it was overly romantic aswell.
Some sort of sound started to form in my head, just some mild reverby string lead, ambiance, mixed together with the sounds of rain falling on the nylon of the tent and some trippy sounds from my dreams which basically consisted of memories from the evening, echoing voices, the sound of tent zipper.
At some moment sun came out from clouds. I was still half asleep at that moment, and the light and the stop of rain mixed with my dreams. I saw people who I was sharing the tent with standing on the tent door. The beams of sun shining in from between them. Bright light. And this sharper and stronger synth lead sound… But it was all just a dream, soon the sun dissapeared and rain came back and I realized that people in my tent were all asleep.
When waking up in the morning and going outside the tent I realized everything was wet outside and rain still kept falling. Packing the tent was intimidating as it was all covered in heavy water. But at the same time, the memories from my restless dreams were still in my head and carried with me until even now.
This is something really inspirational.
Also, when I am running out of inspiration I make small snippets. I probably have thousands of small song snippets lying around, which I never finish, but occasionally reuse in other songs and live perfomances. So nothing is lost and everything is gained.