Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen recently opened one of the most audacious new museums in the world earlier this year with his sprawling Experience Music Project in Seattle. Although it is nowhere near as massive as Paul Allen's world class destination in the Emerald City, there is a modest, yet important museum blooming in San Francisco. Japanese ex-pat Mickey Tachibana dreams of opening the world's first Drum Machine museum in San Francisco. His Drum Machine Museum currently lives only online, but it will have a home somewhere in the Bay Area by 2003. The site is an excellent resource for this neglected yet pivotal instrument. The Drum Machine has an interesting history, and it certainly has contributed greatly to the two most important new genres of modern music in the last 20 years - hip-hop and techno. Tachibana's site and future museum will ensure that this instrument so crucial to digital music gets the respect it justly deserves.

The vibrant Tachibana wants everyone to know as much about the evolution of this key instrument that has helped shape electronic music over the last 20 years as he does and that's a lot.

"The drum machine is the symbolic core of all of today's music," Tachibana explains in English that makes up with passion for what it lacks in precision. "The drum machine museum will try to capture the spirit of the electronic age."

It's hard not to get swept away by Tachibana's enthusiasm. His zeal for the instrument is unrivaled although he wasn't always a drum machine fanatic.

A former mid-level salaryman in Japan, Tachibana was shipped out to the San Francisco office of Kyosha, a desktop publishing company, in the early 1990s. Realizing that his life was becoming an endless series of meetings with people who listened to Kenny G, Tachibana quit and got his drum machine website and business up and running in February 1999. Now he communicates with hundreds of people around the world everyday, but the website is not enough: his personal obsession is to build a community around the drum machine, to reach out to today's youth. His recently blond-streaked hair hints at the wild side beneath the calm demeanor and thick programmer glasses.

"There is an entire generation who live in a world where people program music and don't play it in real time" says Tachibana.

Indeed, the drum machine has been the workhorse of hip-hop and techno, the most important genres of music in the last 20 years. It is all but impossible to imagine today's music without the drum machine. The drop in the price of drum machines in the 1980s brought house and techno to the bedrooms of thousands of visionary producers instead of merely the rich few with access to a studio.

Despite the fact that millions of drum machines have been sold in the last 20 years, Tachibana points out, the academic world has been slow to catch on. "I really feel like there are lots of music schools that neglect electronic music," he says. "The academic world doesn't recognize the drum machine as an instrument."

True enough: the drum machine has been vilified, misunderstood, and only recently celebrated. A few schools have started to recognize it as an instrument, including Oberlin, Indiana University, and Dartmouth, institutions that have electronic music programs. But for the most part the drum machine has flourished underground.