You have played two positions. There are five, and after the fifth the first one comes back an octave higher — that is the whole neck. Nothing in them is new: the same five notes, laid out under the hand in five places.
All five, along the neck
The A minor pentatonic scale has five playable positions, at frets 5–8, 7–10, 9–13, 12–15 and 14–17.
There are five shapes, and each one starts on a different note of the scale. Once you know one shape you can slide it along the neck, and once you know all five they join up to cover the whole neck.
Look at where they meet. Each box shares a fret or two with the one on either side of it, which is why you can leave one position and arrive in the next without a gap. The joins are the whole map: learn those and the five shapes stop being five things.
One scale, not five
The same notes, climbed in one line
The climb runs from fret 5 to fret 22 and plays eighteen notes.
This is one path from the lowest root to the top of the neck, and it plays each note once, never on two strings. It takes three notes on every string. The widest stretch on any one string is five frets.
This is the scale played from its lowest note to its highest, taking the strings in order, which crosses every box on the way. If you can play it as one line up the neck and back, you have the map — not as five shapes to recall, but as one instrument.
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