We develop a general framework to assess the joint effect of pulse shaping and spreading sequence statistics on asynchronous DS-CDMA. which also allows pulse and sequence optimal design. For each pulse we also consider an implementation effort proportional to how much its energy is concentrated into a finite time interval. We are first able to show that, within the class of band-limited pulses, sinc-shaped profile paired with i.i.d sequences are able to minimize Multiple Access Interference (MAI) but maximize implementation effort. We then introduce a family of pulses that generalizes raised cosine profiles and show that, leveraging on the possibility of jointly designing sequence statistics and pulse profile, they help addressing the trade-off between MAI and implementation effort.