Pentatonic Jigsaw - Introduction
Pentatonic Jigsaw — Stop Following the Bouncing Ball, Start Owning the Fretboard
If you've ever sat down to "learn the pentatonic scale" and ended up staring at a bouncing dot on a screen, mashing the right fret at the right time, only to switch the app off an hour later and realise you still can't actually play anything — this tool is for me. And it's for you too.
I built Pentatonic Jigsaw because I needed it. After a decade of paid apps, video courses, books, and YouTube rabbit-holes, I had a head full of macro information and no working memory of how any of it actually fit together on the neck. The information was all out there. The problem was getting it to stick in a way I could use — at a jam, over a backing track, playing along to a song I love.
This is the tool I wish had existed when I started.
The Conveyor Belt — Why Pentatonics Just Keep Going
Here's the idea that changed everything for me: the five pentatonic box positions aren't five separate things to memorise. They're one shape that keeps cycling up the neck. Position 1 leads into Position 2, which leads into Position 3, and so on — and when you get past Position 5, you're back at Position 1 again, an octave higher. It's a conveyor belt. The pieces never stop circling.
The Jigsaw shows you this directly. Hit Next and watch a single position slide along the neck. Hit it again, and the next position picks up exactly where the last one left off. The colours show you where the pieces interlock — where one box's notes are also the next box's notes. Those overlaps are the joints in the jigsaw. Once you see them, you stop thinking in five disconnected boxes and start seeing one continuous fretboard.
Underneath the conveyor there's a little explanation that updates as you step — telling you which position you're on, which fret the root is anchored to, how far you've shifted from the last box, and where the next one is heading. It's a tutorial that walks itself.
Who This Is For
This is for the player who's tired of bouncing dots.
It's for the person who wants to jam along with their favourite bands or a backing track on YouTube, not "complete level 12" of a gamified scale trainer.
It's for the player who's been told a hundred times that "the pentatonic is the most important scale" and still can't move past Position 1 in A minor without freezing up.
It's for visual learners. It's for doer learners — people who need the information sat in front of them so they can process it themselves, at their own pace, without a metronome dictating the speed of their understanding.
It's for left-handed players, who get treated as an afterthought by most software. The Jigsaw was built lefty-first — the default orientation is left-handed, with the nut on the right where it belongs. Right-handers get a one-click flip. Both views are first-class.
And it's for anyone who's spent years collecting macro knowledge from books, websites, and videos, and feels overwhelmed trying to assemble it. This isn't a theory tool. I'm not going to teach you what a flat third is or why the minor pentatonic works over a 12-bar blues. There are thousands of resources doing that already, and many of them are excellent. What this tool does is take the knowledge you already have and put it in front of you visually so you can build the working memory to use it.
What's Actually In There
Here's a tour of the controls.
Root key. Twelve buttons, all twelve keys. Pick A, pick F#, pick Eb. Whatever your backing track is in, set the root and the entire fretboard re-draws around it. No more "but I only know it in A minor" — every key works the same way.
Scale. Two pills: Minor Pent and Major Pent. Tap to switch. The shapes are identical — same five box positions, same conveyor — but the root and intervals shift. Learn one, and the other is already 80% in your hands.
Fret range. Three options: 1–15 (the working range for most players), 12–24 (the dusty end, for soloing high), or 0–24 (the whole neck). Start where you're comfortable. Expand when you're ready.
Box positions. Five toggleable pills, one per position, each in its own colour. This is where you take control. Turn them all on if you want the whole picture. Turn four of them off and study just Position 1 in isolation. Turn two on and look at where they overlap. The whole point of this tool is that you pick what to look at and how much. Don't try to learn five positions at once. Pick one. Sit with it. Add another. See where they share notes. That's how the jigsaw locks together in your head.
Conveyor belt strip. Underneath the fretboard. Prev, Next, position pills, and Show all. Step through one box at a time, watch it move up the neck, read the explanation that updates with each step. Or jump straight to a position by tapping its pill. Or hit Show all to see the full picture.
Save. This one matters. Set up the view exactly how you want it — your key, your scale, your handedness, your active positions, your zoom level — and hit SAVE. Next time you open the tool, it's all still there. No more re-configuring every session. There's a RESET button right next to it for when you want to start fresh.
Lefty / righty toggle. Top-right of the header. L and R. Click to flip the entire fretboard. The nut moves, the strings reverse, the labels follow. It's a true mirror, not a hack.
Light / dark theme. Sun icon in the header. Pick whichever your eyes prefer.
Zoom. Minus, FIT, plus. Or use Ctrl + / Ctrl − / Ctrl 0 on a keyboard. The board scales smoothly so you can fit it on a phone screen or blow it up on a big monitor for practice across the room.
How To Actually Use It With A Backing Track
This is the part most tools skip. Here's the workflow:
- Pick a song or backing track you actually want to play over. Search YouTube for "[band name] backing track" or "blues backing track in A minor" or whatever pulls you in. The key thing is that you want to listen to it. Motivation matters more than method.
- Find out what key it's in. Most backing track titles tell you ("Slow Blues Backing Track in E minor"). For songs, a quick search for "[song name] key" usually does it. Or use a tool like Chordify if you're stuck.
- Set the root key in the Jigsaw to match.
- Set Minor Pent or Major Pent. Blues, rock, and most rock-pop solos = minor pent. Country, folk, sunny pop = major pent. If you're not sure, try minor first — it's the safer default for most contemporary backing tracks.
- Start with one box position. Turn off the other four. Play the track. Noodle inside that one shape. Land on the root note (the bigger ringed dots) when the chord changes feel like they want to resolve. That's it. That's playing in key.
- Add a second position when the first feels boring. Watch where it overlaps with the first. Use those overlap notes as bridges between the two shapes.
- Keep adding pieces. Keep saving your setup. Build the jigsaw at your pace.
Within a couple of weeks of doing this — not drilling app exercises, but actually playing along to music I cared about — I'd internalised more of the fretboard than I had in ten years of structured "lessons." That's why I'm telling you about this tool.
The Honest Pitch
I'm not going to claim this replaces a teacher, or that it's better than learning theory properly, or that it'll make you Hendrix in six weeks. None of those things are true.
What I will claim is this: if you're a visual or hands-on learner who's tired of following the bouncing ball, this tool gives you the visual scaffolding to make all the other stuff you've been studying finally click. It puts the information in front of you. It lets you control how much of it you look at. It removes the pressure of metronome-driven gamification. And it lets you build the working memory at the speed your brain actually works at.
Pick one position. Pick a key. Pick a backing track. Save your setup. Come back tomorrow.
That's how you break out of the box.
Pentatonic Jigsaw is free, runs in your browser, works on phone, tablet, and desktop, and saves your preferences locally — nothing leaves your device. Built by a guitarist, for guitarists, at practice-room.co.uk.