Some serious help with production :(

[Cook]

Ok so ive tried to do some research on most of these questions but googles no help, neithers the NI website.

So all my synths are coming the day i get paid, 16th feb. I'm getting NI komplete 7

At the moment i have NI maschine + ableton live 8. what i was doing before was creating basic drumbeats in maschine, exporting them as WAVS then importing them into ableton under an acapella and adding in loops i got free from sounds2sample etc.

But now i fancy creating my own music.
Im guessing a keyboard is mandatory for playing out the synths? getting an m-audio oxygen 49 to start with.

Also have NI The finger, i have tried to map my maschine to it as a midi controller but have never been able to get it to work, so im worried that i wont be able to get my synths to work with my keyboard,

Is there anything i should be doing?
The fact that the the finger VST goes to a midi tab instead of an audio effect confuses me i have the VST running and playing a loop over and over, im changing dials but nothing is happening

thanks in advance.

[ron solo]

subtractive synthesis my friend =] with that you'll be amazed at what you can do

[Lambox]

But now i fancy creating my own music.
Im guessing a keyboard is mandatory for playing out the synths? getting an m-audio oxygen 49 to start with.

Mandatory? No. But useful? Yes. You can use the piano roll in Ableton to manually map out the notes you want played.

Also have NI The finger, i have tried to map my maschine to it as a midi controller but have never been able to get it to work, so im worried that i wont be able to get my synths to work with my keyboard,

Is there anything i should be doing?
The fact that the the finger VST goes to a midi tab instead of an audio effect confuses me i have the VST running and playing a loop over and over, im changing dials but nothing is happening

thanks in advance.

While I'm not familiar with The Finger (apart from a quick Google search I just did), I can tell you that any VST that you use is going to be a MIDI track. The reason being is because it uses MIDI data to feed to the VST to tell it what notes to play.

Audio tracks are simply audio and do not really 'generate' sound on their own.

For example, let's say you have a drum loop. You would (usually) load that into an audio channel. The sound has already been generated into a format that Ableton can read. Now, you also have a VST to create a bassline. That will be a midi track, because the VST still has to process the sound.

Hope that makes sense.