A new low rate speech coder based on the Multi-Band Excitation (MBE) model is presented that incorporates features of existing Code Excited Linear Prediction (CELP) [12] and Multi-Band Excitation (MBE) [1] coders. Unlike existing MBE coders, the spectral envelope information is represented using Linear Prediction Coefficients (LPCs). The coder provides communications quality speech at 3kbit/s and offers significant gains in robustness over other MBE coders. The complexity is low enough for implementation on commercial DSP devices.