In 1990 he began his training in Salzburg with a Mozarteum scholarship, where he studied the guitar with Eliot Fisk, early music with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Anthony Spiri and contemporary music with Oswald Salaberger. He completed his studies with the highest award in 1991, receiving the prize which the Cultural Ministry of Austria grants to the best graduates.

In total, Clerch got more than 30 grants, a first prize at the Andrés-Segovia-Competition in Granada, at the Heitor-Villalobos-Competition in Rio de Janeiro and the ARD Competiton in München.

Joaquin Clerch has appeared in concerts in Paris, Tokyo, Munich, Frankfurt, Brussels, Athens, Toronto, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Bogota, Belgrade, Istanbul and Salzburg, among other places. He has collaborated as a soloist with such well-known orchestras as the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bogota Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Orchestra, the Slovak Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba, the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg. With the Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria under Adrian Leaper, he made the first recording of two guitar concertos dedicated to him by Leo Brouwer (Concierto de la Habana, 1998) and Carlos Fariñas (Concierto, 1996). Since 1999, Joaquín Clerch has been professor of guitar at the Robert Schumann University in Düsseldorf.