We study the spectra of heavy-light and heavy-heavy mesons containing charm quarks, including higher spin states. We use two sets of $N_f = 2 + 1$ gauge configurations, one set from QCDSF using the SLiNC action, and the other configurations from the Budapest-Marseille-Wuppertal collaboration, using the HEX smeared clover action. To extract information about the excited states, we choose a suitable basis of operators to implement the variational method.
