Is it Possible to Create Guitar Chords on the Fly?

This is a question that has long plagued me with the guitar: can you create novel guitar chords on the fly, or are you stuck with the same old chord shapes forever. Sure the common chord grips work well in sight reading situations and they can help you get by in a pinch, but shouldn't there be more out there to explore?

How would you be able to create new and exiting tonalities while playing through a piece? One of the only ways I can think of is to really learn intervals and slowly get better and better at them. With this method, you can start out just playing single intervals for a chord. For example, if you are supposed to be playing a Fmaj7, you could just play a perfect 5th with F as the root. Or you could play a major third from F.

Once you get really proficient at playing those single intervals, then you could move on to three note chords of any type. You could play an F major triad over Fmaj7, or you could play something like the root, third, and seventh. In this fashion you could keep getting more and more advanced until you are creating pretty full chords on the fly, and running into some interesting combinations of notes in the process.

Not only would this give you a more interesting approach to chords, it would also help you really understand music theory in general and probably increase the effectiveness of all of your playing.

If you are getting tired of the same old guitar chords, give the interval method a try and start building your own chord shapes from scratch.