thanks, lotsa stuff to unpack.
figured out guitarix on my own and installed it. played with the controls a bit, hella lag and tons of noise, I imagine there's some stuff to tweak there, will look for some simple tutorials to get me started. maybe convert some old tape player into a headphones amp as buying stuff isn't in the cards right now.
don't got a mono plug atm so I made do with a stereo adapter and then enabling just one channel in guitarix as input. the lag could be due to my 16 year old CPU being too slow, but it is what it is.