One of the major drawbacks of OFDM is high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) which can result in poor power efficiency and serious distortion in the transmitter amplifier. Tone reservation (TR) is a technique designed to combat this problem by reserving a number of carriers (tones) in the frequency domain to generate a cancellation signal in the time domain to remove high peaks. However TR can have a high associated computational cost due to the difficulties in finding an effective cancellation signal in the time domain by using only a few tones in the frequency domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to overcoming this problem by creating a Gaussian pulse as the cancellation signal from only a small number of reserved tones. This facilitates a simple and effective algorithm for reducing peak values while minimizing the occurrence of secondary peaks, the latter being a key factor in contributing to the high computational complexity of tone reservation algorithms.