I've been having lots of fun with that lately, especially hammering on from the minor to major 3rd, bending up to the major 3rd, etc. It's interesting how you can jump between major and minor and still sound extremely blusey. Can sound more like what a saxaphone would play or something.
Another fantastic sounding thing to do (over the I chord) is to bend up
to the b7
from the 6 (a semitone). I'm addicted to that!
It's awesome!
Another fun thing I'm doing is bending the 2nd to all different places. To the minor 3rd, major 3rd, even the 4th or 5th (2.5 tone bend). Apparently it's called "milking it" which is just a cool name, IMO. So in A, that's bending the 12th fret of the B string up to the 13th, 14th,15th and 17th frets, and then hitting the A at the 10th fret of the B string. Good fun! Thanks Mr King.
I still reckon the blues scale is worth knowing, but thinking in terms of chords has expanded on that. It is extremely useful to know where your 3rds, 5ths, 6ths and b7s are as well as your 1s.
For what it is worth, I reckon one key to it is knowing, for instance, what it
sounds like when you bend up the b7 to the root, or
slide from the 4th to the 3rd. That way, whenever you want that sound, you just play it at will. That way you can think up music and play. To be honest, I don't know all of them. I've just broken free of the pentatonic box in the last few months. But I notice that the two above, which both work extremely well both rest on chord tones, like Kirk was saying.