That’s rarely done by the blues greats. For a blues in A, using A minor pentatonic over all the chords sounds just fine, and it’s probably the most common approach. A “next level” approach is to use A major pentatonic over the A chord, and return to A minor pentatonic for the the D and E.
“Chasing the chords” is a very high level, and is not used much in reality, at least not in the blues. If you do, you can use either the major or minor pentatonic over each chord.
Most of the greats use the minor pentatonic scale of the key the song is in probably 90% of the time, occasionally spicing things up with the major pentatonic over the 1 chord.
What does Justin always say? If it sounds good, it is good.
Great question, I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week as I struggle with the same thing.
I think the trick is to learn certain anchors at various points in the chord loop, so you can check you are still roughly in the right place without it taking all your brain power. Other than that, the note is either on the foot up or foot down stroke.
I’ve been studying Keith Richards solo from the live version of Sympathy for the Devil for some time and just yesterday came to the realisation he’s only on the beat for one note of each phrase, in this case the middle note but simpfying that, I think as long as the phrase starts and stops at the right time, it should sound good and less robotic.
Like I say this only hit me yesterday and I’m in the same place as the op, but i was excited to figure this out.
@Akshin you might want to think a bit about your time feel. You suggest in your op that this may be a little weak. Most of the time in a song I’m not consciously thinking where beats 2, 3 and 4 are. I know where the 1 is (Bootsy Collins told us we needed to know that in a famous video - he may have just been referring to bass players though). I’m not really a foot tapper either (piano was the 1st instrument I learned, so feet do stuff on pedals).
Some thoughts on how you can train your time feel / perception:
Listen to a song. Tap something (foot, finger on table, drum stick on a pad etc.) on the 1st beat. After a while do it on the 3, then the 2 then the 4. Once you are good at this do 1 and 3 ( usually the kick drum hits), then 2 and 4 (usually the snare drum hits).
Then you can go to the off beats.
Or for a style specific example, you might want to tap on the 1 plus “2and” beats if you are into funk.
Being tuned in to the drums will help your time feel. Bass and rhythm guitar also. You may find that listening for the different drum instruments helps. I think of this in a similar way to vision. E.g. focus on something close (e.g. a computer screen) then focus on something further away ( e.g. the house opposite). Do the same with your hearing and bring say the kick drum into focus, then let it go and bring the snare in, listen to the snare for a while, then bring the bass into focus, then rhythm guitar. You can do this anytime you are listening to music. You can do this with any of the instrument or vocal parts, but drums, then bass, then rhythm guitar are the most useful for time feel.
The objective is that eventually you aren’t really having to think about the time feel - it’s almost subconscious . This doesn’t mean you don’t have to listen to the drummer -you certainly do. Rather that you just have to stay with the drummer’s time but don’t need to do any counting. Hopefully you can then apply more brain power to other things, such as improvisation.
Moving away from time feel, I agree with a few of the others about knowing when the chords are changing and what those chords are, is important.