The Five Positions: Connecting the Whole Fretboard
Stop being “the player who only knows the first position.” With the five shapes — Mi, Sol, La, Ti, Re — one scale can cover the entire fretboard.
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- The Five Positions: Connecting the Whole Fretboard9 min
- The CAGED System: Linking Chords and Scales9 min
- Find Any Chord Instantly with Root + Degree8 min
- Relative Major/Minor & the Natural Minor Scale8 min
- Intro to Modes: Dorian and Mixolydian9 min
- Arpeggios: The Skeleton of Improvising8 min
- Seventh-Chord Shapes: Play Them All Over the Neck by Root String10 min
- Three-Notes-Per-String (3NPS): A Map for Fast Runs and Licks9 min
Why five positions
The same scale shows up again and again across the fretboard. Break it into five “shapes” (positions) that link end to end, and you can cover the whole neck from the low positions to the high ones.
Learn them and you can find notes, improvise, and connect chords to melodies anywhere on the neck — instead of being stuck in the first position.
What each of the five shapes looks like
The Mi shape is the most compact, with the root note near the nut side; the Sol shape sits in the middle and is fairly tight; the La shape covers a wider vertical span; the Ti shape sits higher up and is more spread out; the Re shape has the widest stretch. Each shape is 2–3 octaves of the same scale.
- 💡 Play one shape up and down until it's second nature before moving to the next — don't try to swallow them all at once.
How they loop
No matter the key, the five shapes link end to end in a fixed order (for example, in the key of C from low to high: Mi → Sol → La → Ti → Re). Pick a key and you know which shape sits at each position — that's the power of “shifting” the same shape around.
C Minor pentatonic · The first position for rock / improv — learn this one first
Red = root, orange = scale notes; open-string notes sit to the left of the nut (the thick line on the far left). Tap any note to hear it, or press "Play scale" to hear one octave ascending from the root. Switch the labels to "Degree" to see the relative intervals; change the root or scale and you'll see the same position shape slide as one along the fretboard — that's the heart of the five scale positions.
On the fretboard map, choose “C Major Pentatonic” and change the root note to watch the same set of shapes shift as a whole — that's the heart of the five positions; tap a note to hear it, or play the whole scale.
Practice checklist
- On the fretboard scale map, choose C major pentatonic and find the “position shapes” from low to high.
- Pick one shape and play it up and down within its range until it's solid and the shape is memorized.