Originally posted by Cerebum OK. I got to the bar and the lighting was awful. No spotlights on the band just ambient and background light. Thank god I took my plastic 35mm f2.4 overall it was disappointing but I got some I liked ........ Well, didn't hate! Very grainy though, I was up at iso3200 at f2.4 just so I could shoot at 1/100 & 1/160
Yeah, this is why you need to scout out a venue beforehand.
Without lighting, you could use an f1.8 lens for all your shots to try to keep the ISO to 1600. You may still have had to do too much noise reduction, and murder the colours so much you had to do B&W conversion anyway.
Or you could leverage the fact it's your son, and instead try to really nail half a dozen shots with flash - the band'd tolerate you more than a nobody in the pub.