Juha Järvinen is a Finnish acoustic guitarist. In 2017 he posted covers to the Acoustician YouTube channel, where his stated goal was to provide free high-quality content to showcase everything he knows/learns about playing an acoustic guitar.
It is on the Acoustician channel that Juha’s cover of Hotel California first attracted viewers, until it was blocked by Universal Music. There is however a version of the song still up on the site as a videoless track on Juha’s The Acoustician album. There is also a version on YouTube uploaded by “Acoustic Sukran”.
Hotel California is the best-known song by the Los Angeles country rock band The Eagles. This instrumental cover is a surprise hit considering that it appears on the obscure Acoustic Sukran YouTube channel, where it has by far the largest number of viewings of all the postings.
Sukran has recorded and posted videos of himself playing a number of acoustic covers. On his about page on YouTube he describes his Acoustic Sukran channel as “All in India”. Nonetheless not all of the posted tracks are by Sukran, which is Arabic for “thank you”, and not all are from India, including the standout Hotel California cover.
The first give away that all is not what it seems is the mix of lefthanded and righthanded guitar players in the posted videos. The second is the distinctive wood-grain finish of the Ibanez EW50 guitar which appears only on the Eagles’ cover. Thirdly, the playing on the Hotel California cover is far more skilful than that on any of the other tracks. Finally, the name Juha Järvinen appears at the end of the video.
By 2018, Juha stopped posting, including on the other platforms linked to his YouTube account. Such was his impact, that there is a Quora question asking what happened to “the YouTube guitar sensation Juha Järvinen aka Acoustician?” The answer seems to be that he stopped posting music to social media. It is speculated that he is the same Juha Järvinen who became Executive Vice President-Commercial, Virgin Atlantic in January 2019.
The song Hotel California by The Eagles was a 1977 single and album title track. In 1988, the readers of guitarist magazine voted the track’s distinctive long guitar coda the best guitar solo of all times. See more videos posted to the Acoustician YouTube channel.