Download music from iMac to iPad via iTunes

Question

I just want to move a few albums from my iMac iTunes library onto my iPad 3. My music was ripped from my own CDs and was not purchased from the iTunes store. I am not using iTunes Match. I am using OS X 10.8.2, iTunes 11.0.1, and iOS 6.0.1.
I plugged my iPad into my iMac with a USB cord and selected the iPad under devices in the left side of iTunes. In the Summary pane, only "Synch with this iPad over Wi-Fi" is checked. I clicked on the Music tab at the top, checked Synch Music, and clicked the radio button to sync selected music. Then I scrolled down the list of albums and checked six albums. The horizontal bar at the bottom of the iTunes window shows a yellow bar labelled "Other" but nothing else (i.e., no Audio). Next, I clicked the Synch button. The messages "Preparing to Synch" and "Determining Tracks..." flashed by at the top of the iTunes window, and nothing else happened. No Audio bar shows at the bottom of the iTunes window, no albums appear in the Music app on the iPad. If I open the iPad's name under Devices on the left side of iTunes, and click Music, all the albums and their tracks appear in light gray but this music is not on my iPad. The Synch button still does nothing.
I have also tried dragging the albums from my iTunes music library onto the name of my iPad under "Devices" on the left side of the iTunes window. I see a green plus sign, but when I drop the music nothing happens. If I click the Summary tab and check "Manually manage music and videos," an Audio section immediately appears in the bar at the bottom of the iTunes window. If I click the Synch button, nothing happens except that the Audio section disappears again.
I really don't understand this. It seems like such a simple thing to want to transfer a few albums from my iTunes library on my iMac to my iPad. This app seems so counter-intuitive. Can anyone explain to me how to perform this one simple task successfully? Thank you.

Answer 1

Thanks for the help, Demo. I did what you suggested, except that I could not check "Sync only checked songs and videos" because it was grayed out for some reason. When I clicked the Apply button, iTunes got stuck with a message displaying at the top of the window that said "Step 4 of 4: Waiting for changes to be applied."
What finally solved this problem was ejecting the iPad and disconnecting its USB cable and doing a hard restart, then simultaneously rebooting the iMac. After both devices were back up, I reconnected the iPad with the USB cable and clicked Apply again. This time the music was transferred to the iPad. I think I probably needed to restart the iMac as soon as I updated iTunes to 11.0.1 since this was also necessary when I updated it to 11.0.
I still feel that transferring a few music files to the iPad should be much simpler and more intuitive. Jony Ive, we need you!