Toplining 101: Melody & Lyrics in Songwriting

Clare Dove's Toplining 101 is built around a single, narrow promise: by the end of its eleven short lessons, a total beginner will have written the melody and lyric for one song. It delivers on that promise efficiently, but it is a course of first steps, not a course of craft depth.

The structure is linear and sensible. It opens by defining what a "topline" even is, contrasting the sung melody-and-lyric line against the instrumental underneath it, using a short sung example to make the distinction concrete. From there it walks through sourcing a chord progression or beat (with a nod to Splice and generic YouTube instrumental searches for anyone without production or instrument skills), then into melody generation, then structure, then lyric writing, then a short section on getting unstuck when the process stalls. Each lesson builds directly on the last, and the whole thing is short enough to complete in a single sitting.

The core technique

The most useful stretch of the course is the melody-generation exercise: loop the chosen instrumental, sing five full unfiltered passes over it without stopping or evaluating, then take a few minutes of silence and notice which phrases are still stuck in the listener's own head. It is a simple idea, but it is a genuinely functional way to bypass the perfectionism that stalls most first-time songwriters. The lyric-writing lesson builds on this well, showing how the vowel sounds that recur in those hummed melodies can be reverse-engineered into actual words and lines, rather than starting from a blank page. This is the closest thing the course has to a signature method, and it holds up as advice independent of the rest of the material.

The song structure lesson, by contrast, is thin. It names verse, pre-chorus, and chorus and describes their general emotional job in a pop arc, but it never gets into bar counts, common chord functions, or how melodic range actually differs across sections beyond "start lower, build energy." Listeners who already know basic song form will find nothing new here, and listeners who don't may still be unsure how to apply the labels once the lesson ends.

Where it falls short

The lyric-and-concept lesson leans heavily on advice like "write from authenticity" and "say something familiar in a new way," illustrated with a passing reference to an Adele song rather than a worked example from scratch. It is reasonable advice, but it stays conceptual where a beginner would benefit from watching a full lyric line built and revised in real time. Similarly, the creative-blocks lesson (going for a walk, taking a day off, finding a co-writer) is common sense rather than a specific unblocking technique.

None of this makes the course bad, but it does cap its ceiling. It is well-paced, clearly spoken, and genuinely useful for someone who has never attempted a song and needs a low-pressure on-ramp with a concrete finish line. Anyone who already writes, records, or produces regularly will likely find the exercises too basic and the theory too shallow to justify the runtime, though the vowel-sound lyric trick may still be worth the few minutes it takes to reach it.

What you will learn

• ·How to find or source an instrumental or chord loop that emotionally resonates enough to write over
• ·A five-pass 'melody dumping' technique for generating unfiltered melodic ideas without self-judgment
• ·The classic pop song structure of verse, pre-chorus, and chorus and how each should function melodically
• ·How to extract lyrics from vowel sounds already present in a hummed melody
• ·How to write lyrics that are personal but still relatable to a wider audience
• ·Basic strategies for pushing through creative blocks, including walking away and co-writing