This paper proposes and experimentally demonstrates, for the first time, two new candidate pulse shapes for carrier-less amplitude and phase modulation in the context of visible light communications. It is commonly accepted that the pulse shape at the heart of the Hilbert pair used to generate the required orthogonal signal spaces should be the square-root raised cosine. In this work, we introduce two additional candidate pulse shapes, namely the first-order Xia pulse and the socalled

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... n-Nyquist pulse. We demonstrate experimentally that the better-than-Nyquist pulse offers superior bit-error rate performance compared to the square-root raised cosine and Xia pulses under additive white Gaussian noise channel conditions, whilst offering lower computational complexity. Index Terms-Carrier-less amplitude and phase modulation, digital signal processing, modulation formats, pulse shaping, visible light communications.