Hooking up external synth. monitoring problem. HELP!!!

Question

so...i had been using garageband without a problem. i am having a problem with logic. i want to record the sounds off my alesis micron. i have 1/4 inch cables running through a tascam us 122. that is hooked up to my macbook pro via usb cable (just trying to be specific here as to how i have things hooked up and my settings). computer input is the us-122, the output is the headphones built in output (instead of the output on t he tascam).
heres what i have been trying:
i have the driver on the tascam within logic. clicked on an audio track...enable recording. when i play my keyboard i can see that its picking up a signal...but i can't hear anything. even when playing one of the tutorial tracks that come with logic i cannot hear anything. so i experiment...i record, play my synth a little (even though i can't hear it) and stop. it records the waveform. when i try to play back, i can't hear it. when i switch the driver to direct line...only then can i hear what i records (i cannot hear my synth when the driver is set to direct line, no signal comes through obviously). my initial thought was that there is a monitor play thru button somewhere like garage band. the software monitoring was clicked the whole time. i have no idea what i'm doing wrong. can anyone help me?
sorry for being longwinded here but im trying to give as much information as possible.

Answer 1

With no offense intended: your questions seem to indicate confusion on an extremely basic level that's probably quite beyond the scope of this forum.
It sounds like you need an introduction to basic MIDI, and the differences between MIDI and audio.
http://www.tweakheadz.com/howto_get_started_withmidi.html
Basically, MIDI is the equivalent of sheet music - it tells the performing instrument which note(s) to play at what time. What the actual audio generated sounds like is of no concern to MIDI - that depends on the instrument used.
The audio is the equivalent of a CD recording of the sheet music being performed. It's a completely different medium, as it were.
Where it gets confusing is in devices that do both, such as the Kaoss pad: you can use it as a MIDI controller to influence the parameters of the synthesizer, AND you can use it to mangle the audio that comes out of the synthesizer (or anywhere else).
You're going to want to hook the Kaoss pad up via MIDI and audio; the trick is using the Presonus Firebox's mixer/routing application to route the incoming/outgoing audio to your monitor system and into the Kaoss pad at the same time (so as to be able to add FX from the Kaoss pad).
The audio routing will probably be easier to setup for an inexperienced user/better to control with an external mixer, though the Presonus is certainly potent enough to get it all done in software. But how to set that up really depends on what exactly you're looking to be doing.
It's easier to fiddle around with cables and a hardware mixer if you're just learning.