DNS question about initial Master/Slave setup

Hey everyone. I'm creating a DNS master/slave server set up.

I have the configurations all done I believe, the master has the required zone file, and the named.conf file has the allow transfer and allow query stuff set. The slave has it's own configs set.
My question is that when initially setting this up, do I need to have a matching zone file on the slave? Or should there be no existing zone file, and the master will transfer it to the slave?

What causes the slave to initially ask for it if none exists to start with?

On the slave you redefine each zone in named.conf.
But where the master has

type master;

the slave has

type slave;
masters { your_master_ip; }

The zone files are created if not present.