Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described. In some systems, a transmitting device may perform a pre-distortion of a signal on a resource allocation for the signal and using discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-domain processing. For example, the transmitting device may perform a first frequency-domain (FD) to time-domain (TD) transform, which may be an example of an inverse DFT (IDFT), on a first set of FD symbols to obtain a first set of TD samples. A size of the first FD to TD transform may be based on the resource allocation for the signal. The transmitting device may perform a crest factor reduction (CFR) function on the first set of TD samples to pre-distort the signal in the TD (e.g., in the IDFT domain), which may enable the transmitting device to avoid out-of-band (OOB) emission or otherwise have greater control over where the pre-distortion contributes energy.