When performers or recording engineers talk about "cutting a track", those words can be the literal truth. Making a phonograph record – the first kind of sound recording – has always meant using some kind of a sharp object (most recently a heated cutting stylus), to cut a groove into the surface of some suitable material, and to wiggle that groove right, left, up, down, or, for stereo, in all of those ways, diagonally at the same time, for the purpose of recording sound. The recording material has ranged from Edison's beeswax to a special lacquer, and the finished recording has been everything from a wax cylinder through, currently, a heat-stamped vinyl disc, but the process, itself, has always remained essentially the same.