Reply to Some serious help with production :(

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.