This paper describes an efficient harmonic-CELP speech coder by taking advantages of harmonic and CELP coders into account. According to frame voicing decision, the proposed harmonic-CELP coder adopts the RP-VSELP coder as a fast CELP in case of an unvoiced frame, or an improved harmonic coder in case of a voiced frame. The proposed coder has main features as follows: simple pitch detection, fast harmonic estimation, variable dimension harmonic vector quantization, perceptual weighting reflecting frequency resolution, fast harmonic synthesis, naturalness control using band voicing, and multi-mode. These features make the proposed coder require very low complexity, compared with HVXC coder To demonstrate the performance of the proposed coder, a 2.4 kbps coder has been implemented and compared with reference coders. From results of informal listening tests, the proposed coder showed good quality while requiring low delay and complexity.