Everything you have played so far has been in one position. That was the point: one shape, learned until you stop looking at it. But the box is not the scale. It is one way of holding the scale, and there are four more like it up the neck.
The next position up
Box 2 covers frets 7–10 and holds twelve notes.
This position covers frets 7 to 10, and every note of A Minor Pentatonic lies under one hand there. Five positions like it cover the whole neck, and this is Box 2.
This one starts two frets above the box you know. Nothing in it is new — the same five notes, in the same order — but your hand is in a different place and the notes fall differently under your fingers. The root you will use most here is on the second string, at the tenth fret, high enough to bend without reaching.
Where the two positions meet
The notes both positions hold
Box 1 and Box 2 share six notes.
This diagram shows Box 1 and Box 2 together. The six ringed notes belong to both positions, spread across six strings. If you move from one position to the other through those notes, the listener hears one continuous line.
The ringed notes belong to both boxes, one on each string. They are the door: a phrase that starts in the lower position and crosses at one of them ends up in the higher one without a seam, and a listener hears one line rather than a guitarist changing position.
Practice the crossing on one string at a time. Play up the lower box on the third string, cross at the ringed note, and carry on up the higher one. Then do it coming down. When it stops feeling like two shapes, it has worked.
This lesson was drafted with the help of AI, so it may contain a mistake. Its diagrams are drawn by Everyfret’s own software. How Everyfret is made