About

Beyond the Fifth is a free practice room for guitar. Pick a key, a feel and a tempo, press Play, and a band loops the chords for as long as you want to play over them.

Why it exists

Noodling at home is more fun with a band behind you, but finding a backing track in the right key and tempo is too much faff. So mostly you don’t bother, and you drift back to the same licks in the same box.

This is meant to be less effort than that. Open it and press Play, and the band starts. Most days you won’t need to touch a setting.

While the band plays, the neck shows the current chord’s notes across the fretboard, which makes it easier to get out of box one.

What’s here

• The practice room. The band, a chart showing where it’s up to, and the neck. Switch the neck from Notes to Shape for one way to play the chord.
• The Box finder. The five pentatonic boxes in any key and the notes any two of them share, which are your way from one box to the next. There’s a PDF for every key too.
• The metronome. A click on its own, for when you don’t want the band.

The band

It’s synthesised in your browser rather than recorded, which is how it can change key and tempo while it plays.

It plays blues, rock, funk and a few heavy feels. The heavy ones are tuned to drop D and stay in D. Every part was written for this site, and no riff is copied from a record.

The first visit downloads about 2 MB of sounds. After that your browser keeps them.

Nothing to sign up for

No account, no ads, no analytics and nothing to pay. There are no lessons either.

Your key, feel and tempos are kept on your device. They also sit in the address, so a link opens the room the way you had it.

The site runs on open work by other people, credited on the licences page.