new to ardour and cant figure out what im doing wrong. audio 1 picks up my microphone, but the master doesnt seem to
Do you mean when you record-arm a track, the track shows a signal being received from your mic, but you don’t hear it through your monitoring speakers or headphones? Perhaps you selected Audio Hardware monitoring when your setup needs Ardour monitoring? You can change it via Edit → Preferences → Monitoring → Record monitoring handled by: → Ardour.
Audio Hardware monitoring is more common with an external sound card like a USB audio interface. If you are using your computer’s built-in sound card, Ardour monitoring is likely what you want.