The paper describes a procedure to design adpative controllers when the specifications are given in terms of a number of points of a desired closed-loop frequency response. The key idea is the use of a bank of ’band-compensators’, each one of which is intended to act on its corresponding frequency band. The compensator parameters are updated based on a finite impulse response on-line interpolation of the plant frequency response. The latter is carried out using a bank of filters and independent processing of the complex valued gain of each band. This frequency-domain approach obviates the need of parametric representations for both, plant and reference model, and inherits the robustness properties of frequency response designs.