If you look at pic#3 you will notice a lot of blur on the edges, I struggled with that all night... what setting help eliminate this?
ALIAS
A mixture too slow of a shutter speed capturing ambient along with the exposure from the flash stopping the action.
Shooting with a flash actually creates two exposures; the ambient exposure and the flash. Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO effect the ambient exposure. Aperture and ISO effect the flash exposure.
Shutter speed has no effect on flash (to a point, I'll explain later) exposure; you can use a 5 second shutter speed or a 1/200 and the exposure from the flash will still be the same. That's because the pulse of the flash is so fast, that the shutter speed can't possibly be fast enough to eliminate it. Shutter speed will only have an effect on allowing ambient light to reach the sensor and create the exposure based off of how long the shutter is open.
The flash exposure is controlled by the aperture. To make a flash exposure darker, you can close the aperture which will let in less light for a darker shot. Either that or turning the flash power down if needed.
Aperture also kills ambient light. If you want an exposure of just the flash, you would use your fastest shutter speed (usually 1/160-1/250 depending on the flash and having any high speed sync mode turned off), close down your aperture, and turn up the power on the flash. That would kill ambient and just give you a flash exposure which would stop motion and not allow motion blur from a slow shutter speed and ambient light.
Why is the shutter speed limited when using flash? With most modern cameras, the flash fires at a precise moment in which the shutter passes over the frame causing the whole seen to be exposed. If you shutter travels too fast, then black bars will show on the frame from where the flash didn't expose. That's called max sync or x sync. You can use the high speed sync mode which causes to flash to pulse over time so as to cover the whole frame, but you lose flash power that way and it kills batteries quicker than just one pop.
So what kind of venues are you shooting at? If you end up at a show with good lighting, you won't need a flash. A lot of venues also specifically state no flash. I can comfortably shoot at 6400 ISO with my 5DII and only have to add a bit of noise reduction in post to make the image totally usable.
This is of Badfish at Ram's Head Live in Baltimore. Shot at 6400 ISO with no flash and a 70-200 f/2.8 IS, iirc. Click for the larger if you want. There was a tiny bit of NR done in post, but unfortunately not every where you shoot is going to have good lighting.
you have to have good lighting 
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