"I want to start a community around the museum," Tachibana rhapsodizes. "Like a Drum Machine YMCA!" He animatedly assumes a mock teacher's role at an imaginary drum machine school: "OK, class, now today we are going to have a Roland 808 intermediate class. In this class we will learn how to make a shuffle correctly fifty-fifty or forty-sixty."

When he calms down, he gets serious again: "People can go to Guitar Center and buy equipment and learn all about guitar or drums, but they can't learn about the drum machine. They can only buy equipment, maybe read the manual, but they have no community to help them learn how to really use it." For anyone who has ever tried to get help from a Guitar Center clerk with one of the few drum machines they have for sale, Tachibana's frustration will resonate.

For Tachibana, the exact moment for mainstream acceptance of the drum machine came in 1998, with Madonna's Grammy for Ray of Light. "That record was the first album by a superstar entirely done with a drum machine to win a Grammy," he explains. Now that the music industry and academia have begun to come around, Tachibana feels that it is time to educate the general public which is where the museum comes in.

One can imagine the resistance people feel toward the drum machine; it's nothing but a box with circuits, after all, and unlike, say, a violin, it's just sampled sounds encased in plastic. However, after seeing 80-some drum machines at Tachibana's makeshift Market Street loft space, one can't help being amazed at the technology's evolution, and at the personality of each machine. From 1959's Wurlitzer Sideman, which looks and sounds something like an organ, to this year's sleek Electribe S, replete with sampler, the drum machine has come a long way. Manufacturers have come and gone, and sadly only one American manufacturer, Alesis, remains.

Tachibana, living in his drum machine-centric world, feels deeply about the difference between specific machines and has a particular affinity for American-made instruments. "They were the most innovative," he says. He deadpans a description of the Japanese models: "The Japanese drum machine sound is most 'mid-target market requirement.' The twenty-plus European machines are really 'craftman' sounding, like a watch ... very sensitive, with a thinner, weak sound that is in demand from producers today. The weak sound has character."

It's precisely the question of character that drives Mickey Tachibana. And it takes character and heart to have a dream as big as his. Why not a drum machine museum? And why not in San Francisco? It's always been a city of dreamers. Home to countless musicians, more than a hundred studios, and a seemingly endless supply of open-minded supporters of electronic music, San Francisco seems like a logical place to house this slice of electronic music history. With a place in musical history books as one of techno's American epicenters, the city has soul--and it should come to recognize that the same soul beats in drum machines from around the world.