  A large approximate degeneracy of the excited hadron spectra, appears in the
light meson spectra measured at LEAR, suggesting a novel principal quantum
number n+j in QCD spectra. We recently showed that the large degeneracy could
not be understood with state of the art confining and chiral invariant quark
models, derived in a truncated Coulomb gauge. To search for a solution to this
problem, here we add the gluon or string degrees of freedom. Although
independently the quarks or the gluons would lead to a 2 n +j or 2 n +l
spectrum, adding them may lead to the desired n+j pattern.
