Understanding Scales

I have been playing for a while. I can play most things within reason, but I don't have any clue why they sound great. Like when I listen to a Clapton song, I can tell it is brilliant and the solo fits perfectly, but I don't know why. So I have tried to get into writing some of my own stuff but it has become a painful procedure of guessing, playing, saying yes, no, decent, and moving on. I have started studying scales for solos and fills and I recently heard Clapton play a song live and I wanted to figure out why a fill he used worked. It seems in the scales I have looked at you never have a sequence where four straight notes fit the scale. In this song he used D, D#, E, and F in one fill. He was going from G7 to C and on the EAD strings he played G,A,A#hammerB,D,E,EhammerFpulloffE,B,E,D#,D into a C chord. This is unless I'm just way off on mimicking it on my own guitar. How does this work? It just seems that the scales I see only have at most 3 of 4 notes in a row that fit. Is it because the F wasn't played by itself but only as something to quickly hammer to and then pulloff?
My second question. It may fit the above. Somewhere I read that you can add "chromatic" notes. Does that apply to the above question?

My suggestion, to you, is to play and theorize that of Chopin, not Clapton.

Plus 1, ma tran-thang?

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For understanding the scales, you need to undertand why they work or not is The key of the song.

the example you gave is a bit tricky, but we must also understand that he is one of the best guitarists on the planet and understand music very well, but I think the Key of the song is some G variant maybe bepop with some japanese style on it, if you give me the song name, i can tell the key more better to your example.

Now the understanding the scales, when you are know the key of the song say C major for example. You can look circle of fifths, and you see that it have relative minor that is A minor, to both keys of the songs, c major or a minor, you can play both scales, C major and A minor scales and they fit perfectly on both cases, why? because they contain same notes.

Now if you google some "c major scale positions" you should find a picture that contains 5 boxes, position 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. If you look them more closely, you see that position 2 is both, half of position 1 and half of position 3 same for the position 4 is half of 3 and 5.

Now, lets say the song is in key of A minor and you start playing the scale from position 1, you play it for a while and you are playing A minor, then you get bored to it and play the scale from 5th position, there you are actually playing E minor, if you play it from positon 3, you are actually playing C major.

I also want to point out, that those figures on the scale postions of C major are the SAME figures to ALL major scales, just depends where you start the rootnote. maybe C major is not perfect for understanding this so lets move to "G minor scale positions"

http://www.guitar-chords.org.uk/scales-images/g-minorpentatonicpositions.gif

that is pentatonic, but dont mind that, i want you to figure out the point. Now you see its root note (marked black) start in fret 3 on position 1. That is a note G. Now if you move whole thing towards to starting on fret 5. Yep, you guessed right, its then A minor scale positions.

aaand btw, I know that this is a post from quite long now eh? so maybe you figured this out already, but i wrote it if someone struggling with same things wondering how to lead well.

Hope this helps
-Emp