If you want to shoot your friends’ gigs I think your best bet might honestly be to either lean real hard into slow exposure or lo-fi stylized photos or find a way to add light either through flash or having adding lights to your friends’ stage setups. It’s an odd thing about music photography that the places you’re most likely to begin photographing in also typically force you to work with the most challenging lighting conditions, but since you know the band you have a little bit of an opportunity there to find ways of adding light