Box finder
Pick your key and any two boxes: the five shapes of the minor pentatonic, numbered from the one most players learn first. Every note the two boxes share is ringed. Land on one and you’ve already changed position.
6 shared notes, one on every string. The roots are filled in. b3 is a flat third and b7 a flat seventh. Tap any dot to hear it.
Seeing it is the easy bit
The practice room plays a band in any key, so you can walk from box to box over a twelve-bar instead of in silence.
Why the boxes overlap
Walk up any string playing every note of A minor pentatonic. You get the same five notes, two or three frets apart, until the run starts again twelve frets up. A box is two of those notes per string, the two your hand can reach without moving, so five boxes cover the octave.
On every string, the top note of one box is the bottom note of the next. So neighbouring boxes share one note per string, six in all, and this page rings them. Boxes that aren’t neighbours, like one and three, share nothing.
A shared note belongs to both boxes, so it’s how you connect pentatonic boxes without a jump. Play up to it in box one, carry on in box two, and it sounds like one phrase.
The rings don’t line up in a column, because the B string is tuned a third above the G rather than a fourth. That shifts the pattern a fret as it crosses those two strings.
What to do with this
Pick one pair of neighbouring boxes. They share six notes. Start with box one and box two in A, the picture this page opens on.
Play a short phrase that ends on a shared note, then a second phrase that starts on it in the other box.
Then try it over a band in the practice room.
More on moving between two boxes
Try sliding across. On the B string in A, play the fifth fret, then the eighth, which is shared, and slide that eighth fret up to the tenth. You’ve arrived in box two on the root without a gap.
Give one pair ten minutes a day, at a tempo slow enough that you never have to stop. When you can do it without looking at the neck, move on to the next. Every key has the same five pairs, just at different frets.
Save picture gives you this board as an image. The pentatonic boxes PDF has one pair to a page in the key you’ve picked. Tap any dot to hear its note.