A slipmat is a circular piece of slippery cloth or synthetic materials

disk jockey A disc jockey, more commonly abbreviated as DJ, is a person who plays recorded music for an audience. Types of DJs include radio DJs (who host programs on music radio stations), club DJs (who work at a nightclub or music festival), mobile D ...

s place on the turntable platter instead of the traditional rubber mat. Unlike the rubber mat which is made to hold the record firmly in sync with the rotating platter, slipmats are designed to slip on the platter, allowing the DJ to manipulate a

record A record, recording or records may refer to: An item or collection of data Computing * Record (computer science), a data structure ** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity ** Boot sector or boot record, ...

on a turntable while the platter continues to rotate underneath. This is useful for holding a record still for slip-cueing, making minute adjustments during

beatmatching Beatmatching or pitch cue is a disc jockey technique of pitch shifting or timestretching an upcoming track to match its tempo to that of the currently playing track, and to adjust them such that the beats (and, usually, the bars) are synchroni ...

and mixing and pulling the record back and forth for scratching. They are also very commonly used simply as decoration for when a record isn't on the turntable. The slipmat was invented by hip-hop pioneer

Grandmaster Flash Joseph Saddler (born January 1, 1958), popularly known by his stage name Grandmaster Flash, is an American DJ and rapper. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Hip Hop DJing, cutting, scratching and mixing. Grandmaster Flash and the Fur ...

to improve its sound and move the vinyl counterclockwise without causing too much drag and too much friction. In a Washington Post interview, he recalls “My mother was a seamstress so I knew different types of materials,” he continues. Having settled on felt, Flash encountered another issue. “The problem with felt is that it draped, it was limp,” he recalls. “So I ran home and got a copy of my album and I bought just enough felt to cut out two round circles the same size as a 33’ LP and—when my mother wasn't looking—I turned the iron all the way up high and I used my mother's spray starch. I sprayed it until this limp piece of felt became—I called it a wafer, like what you get in church at Easter. Today it's called a slipmat.”

References

DJ equipment {{Music-stub