I'll usually write a 4 bar loop, run that for a good half hour and vibe on it, take bits out, put bits in. It usually won't have too much melody in it, just enough for a rolling groove. Sometimes just drums. Once I'm happy I'll take it from there. 
lol, nighttime. Definitely. Most of the best shit happens between 1 and 6am. 
Mostly from the music I'm surrounded by, from listening to it intently. A lot of it comes from DJing too. When I first started DJing 8bar / sublo / grime I knew one day I'd be making beats. 
Get on the decks and have a mix with some older records. Nothing like dipping into the archives to reignite the flame. Otherwise, I'll go for a bike ride / for a walk. Repetitive exercise is PERFECT for flashes of ideas / abstract thought.
I'm without a bike right now so I've been walking a lot and discovered I walk at around 132 bpm. I started thinking about my footsteps in 4/4 and suddenly found myself coming up with a lot of ideas that way. 
I've always loved producers that apply the same soundkit again and again but still keep their sound moving fwd. I'm kind of into the idea of using the same elements/patches in batches of tracks and letting my sound mutate from track to track by taking some elements out and putting in new ones. So I'll usually start a new track in a project I'd worked on recently, and then fuck with the patches and replace some of the samples etc.  
Hell yeah definitely! Some of the most challenging music EVERRRR has been unapologetically pop. For some reason we're not that great at it in the UK though, as soon as an artist goes mainstream over here you can pretty much forget about them :( In the US though a lot of pop and minstream r&b and rap production is so inventive and I always take inspiration from that. I'd love to try my hand at it for sure. 
PSP Mixbass. PRESSURE. I swear by it !!!!!!!!! I've also got a few very versatile bass patches that I use time and time again. 
Manara got me a Microkorg years ago as a birthday present because it had a vocoder built in. I never use the vocoder really, but I do I use the synth itself all the time to this day, there's something off of it in pretty much all my riddims. Love it. 
Yes I do. Mixing down is not an exact science, it's a very creative process and is totally vital to how your tracks end up feeling. It's all about sound design. I wouldn't let anybody else near my mixdowns! 
I'm just not that into all the midrange chainsaw 'bass'. The trouble is a lot of people listen to that stuff on laptop speakers and then go off and try and do it themselves, while entirely missing the essential, secret cache of sub bass that needs to be there to keep it weighty. But I try not to complain or write off any one element / technique / sound. This comes less down to techniques and more down to taste. I like tracks with space and dynamics, I don't like tracks that are mad upfront with every space crammed and everything over-compressed.CHIIIZE!!! I wish someone taught me the basics of EQs and mixing down. Mainly I wish I had someone to explain to me that I don't need to be trying to make ultra-loud tracks in one session and that there is more than one step to having a finished track that's loud and playable in a club. The day I found that out was a good day. 
But I'm still learning with every track I make and probably will be for a long time!