Most research on narrow-band coding is concentrated on how to transmit excitation parameters efficiently. However, the important thing in obtaining a good reproduced speech quality is how to control the balance of the transmission bit rate between the excitation and the LPC parameters. Multimode coding, which is proposed here, has two coding modes: One is a mode that transmits the LPC parameters in every frame, as conventional coders (A mode). The other is a mode that avoids the transmission of the LPC parameters by using the same coefficients as the previous frame and increases the bits allocated to the residual quantization instead of to the LPC transmission (B mode). In each frame, the mode selection takes place based on an evaluation of the reproduced speech quality, and the assignment of transmission information is dynamically controlled by switching between the two modes. This coding algorithm is applied to a 7.2 kb/s CELP coder, and approximately 3 dB of improvement is achieved in SNR compared with a conventional CELP coder. The B mode was used 78%–82% of the time.